“I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” Lucy Dacus confesses in “Limerance,” one of the highlights from her fourth album Forever Is a Feeling. It’s a twisted supper-club piano ballad where she’s munching popcorn with friends who smoke weed and play Grand Theft Auto. But the Virginia indie-rock troubadour croons as if she’s living out a lush-life fantasy of Hollywood romance. When she delivers that line about breaking someone’s heart, she gives it a twist: “And if I do, I’ll be breaking mine too.” It’s startling to hear Dacus switch gears like that, in her warmly familiar voice — earnest, mournful, calm even when she’s tormented.
Dacus stretches out on Forever Is a Feeling, at a moment when she’s at her most high-profile. It’s her first album since she conquered the world with Boygenius, teaming up with two of the only indie peers anywhere near her level, Julian Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. The Record had three radically different singer-songwriters blending their voices to come up with new kinds of magic. Dacus’ “You’re in Love” was a brilliant heart-crippler on par with “Triple Dog Dare,” from her masterful 2021 musical memoir Home Video.
Forever takes a different approach, going for adult-specific love songs, rather than the coming-of-age and coming-out tales that made her name. These songs take place in the middle of long-running messy relationships — some desperately romantic, some just painful. “Best Guess” might be the most hopeful song she’s done yet, singing, “You’re my best guess at the future/If I were a gambling man, and I am/You’d be my best bet.” She gets vocal help from comrades like Bartees Strange and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, telling her inamorata, “You may not be angel, but you are my girl.”(Bridgers and Baker pitch in with back-up vocals elsewhere.)
When Dacus first arrived, she was a Southern indie kid with a shy voice, yet her own steely onstage charisma. It was a revelation to see her get up in a bar and sing her solo acoustic version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” turning it into the tale of an anxious queer teen in the sticks, hating what she sees in the mirror but gearing up her courage to go face the great big world. Her sophomore gem Historian, in 2018, stopped you dead in your tracks with “Night Shift,” turning a stupid coffee get-together with an ex into a seven-minute soliloquy of revenge and guilt.
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On Forever Is a Feeling, she aims for more intimate drama. “If the devil’s in the details, then God is in the gap in your teeth,” she sings in “For Keeps.” In the jubilant title song, she takes a romantically charged road-trip over sped-up piano, recalling, “We were cherry-red in your forest-green 1993 Grand Cherokee.” It’s also a song about the emotional compromises that go with desire, as she sings, “You knew the scenic route/I knew the shortcut and shut my mouth/Isn’t that what love’s about?” But there’s a new sense of giddy release in her voice, especially when she asks, “My wrists are in your zip-tie, 25 to life—why not?”
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“Bullseye” is a duet with Hozier, where she pines for a guitar-playing mailman. “I miss borrowing your books to read your names in the margins,” Hozier purrs to her harmonies. “The closest I got to reading your mind.” “Last Time” and “Big Deal” are more downbeat acoustic ballads. “Most Wanted” is the album’s only guitar rocker, and easily its most urgent track sonically, a Byrds-style rave where she’s on a mission “to catch the Most Wanted Man in West Tennessee.” It’s full of electric sexual tension, with her most breathless vocals, as she sings, “I feel your hand under the table at the fancy restaurant/Gripping on my inner thigh like if you don’t I’m gonna run/But I’m not going anywhere.”
Dacus does a lot of self-conscious playing with clichés on Forever, a trick that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, as in the dud “Come Out,” which uses over-the-top harp glissandi as a camp punchline. But it works beautifully in “Ankles,” where she sings about libidinal frustration over staccato cellos, asking, “What if we don’t touch?/What if we only talk about what we want/And cannot have/And I’ll throw a fit?” The tension builds until it explodes in the chorus (“Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed”), with surprisingly poignant Eighties synth burbles. Near the end of the song, she muses, “How lucky we are to have so much to lose.” It could be a motto for Dacus looking back on her amazing first decade—and looking at the unlimited future ahead.
