The single will appear on the musician’s forthcoming studio album, Forever Is a Feeling
Lucy Dacus plays a work of art in the music video for her latest single, “Ankles.” For a few hours, she’s allowed to slip out of the gilded frame holding her to the wall and experience the bustle of city life. Dacus returns to her painting in the end, but she got one last taste of freedom on Wednesday evening when she performed the record on The Tonight Show.
The frame positioned behind Dacus for the duration of the performance is slightly different than the art from the video. It depicts a blue landscape with darkening skies and distant valleys. But Dacus is still in the same royal red dress, sleeves puffed out with a seven-piece band surrounding her. “Agent of chaos, angel of death/One of three ancient fates/Playing with your scissors again,” she sings. “How lucky are we to have so much to lose?/Now don’t move when I tell you what to do.”
“Ankles” arrived earlier this week alongside “Limerence,” both serving as the first singles from Dacus’ forthcoming studio album Forever Is a Feeling. The record is scheduled for release on March 28.
In February, Dacus will perform songs from the album in museums and churches in four cities, including Brooklyn, Chicago, and San Fransisco. Limited tickets were made available through a lottery in December. The performances mark the first Dacus will perform on her own since touring with Boygenius — the supergroup she formed with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker — for most of 2023. Their final show together, for the time being, was in February 2024.
“I just want me and my friends to survive,” Dacus told Rolling Stone in 2023 about the perception of sad-girl-songwriters. “When you internalize it, your personality is sadness, which is a lot of the time tied to depression, which a lot of the time is tied to detachment from life. I want the most joy that I can get, and I want that for everyone that I love. But just on a personal level, I don’t want to be pigeonholed in that. And it’s not true. Shut up. I try to write more nuanced things than that.”
