Since Lucy Dacus released her last album, 2021’s Home Video, “Sapphic folk” has become a genre unto itself. MUNA finally had their long-deserved breakthrough, girl in red got a Sabrina Carpenter feature and Gigi Perez scored a bigger hit than any of her influences with the stunning “Sailor Song.” Music about queerness has always existed—think of Ma Rainey’s 1928 song “Prove It On Me Blues,” or 1970s “women’s music.” Both came decades before Lilith Fair, the immediate predecessors of this modern form. But with the rise of Dacus’s supergroup, boygenius, which she’s in alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, “Sapphic folk” now signifies something specific. You can probably hear it in your head right now: hyper-detailed, occasionally affecting lyrics with deadpan delivery; earthy imagery and playful innuendos; intimate double-tracked vocals, murky rubber bridge guitars and light electronics.
Though the world feels especially hostile to queer and trans people right now, Sapphic folk has had a great run—boygenius’ 2023 full-length garnered the trio several Grammys. Find a queer artist on TikTok, and they’ll likely put #PhoebeBridgers and #LucyDacus in the hashtags even if they’re well established. But the market is starting to feel oversaturated with yearning, and the genre’s formula is growing stale.
Don’t pin it on Dacus, who’s been around since her 2016 debut No Burden launched a 20-label bidding war. It took a long time for Dacus to come to terms with her queer identity, as she detailed in an Oprah Daily essay. Since boygenius blew up, she’s become one of the faces of queer music, freely leaning into it. This comes with its drawbacks. “Once I meet well-known folks, inside 10 minutes we’re speaking about our stalkers,” Dacus said to Los Angeles Times. In a profile for Them, Dacus elaborated further, speaking to “the fear of our whole lives becoming just characters in people’s superhero universe.” Even as there’s an understandable dilemma about how much to share, on her new album, Forever Is a Feeling, she gives the gays everything they want. The artist who once resisted pigeonholing is now doubling down on it.
Feeling was produced by Blake Mills, an acclaimed guitarist who’s worked with an entire adult alternative playlist’s worth of indie heavyweights: Perfume Genius, Alabama Shakes and Laura Marling are among his clients. Dacus brings with her a cavalcade of performers, like musician’s musician Madison Cunningham, genre-hopper Bartees Strange and honorary lesbian icon Hozier. If nothing else, Feeling really feels like the major-label debut it is, polished with an immaculate mix from Lars Stalfors (a true ally, between his work on this and the recent Rebecca Black EP). It feels like an album for people who’ve followed Dacus’s journey since the very beginning.
Dacus often puts away the electric guitar on this record for a softer but more expansive palette, recalling the 2000s adult contemporary she often cites as formative. The declarations of love on lead single “Ankles” feel like her answer to Snow Patrol’s heartsick classic “Chasing Cars,” which she once covered. “Best Guess,” an ode to long-term partnership, would have been a Lite FM classic in another time. Even the more experimental title track would have fit on albums by aughts-era alt-pop acts like Butterfly Boucher and A Fine Frenzy. That’s nothing new for this type of music—the Sapphic anthem “Silk Chiffon” opens with a guitar line recalling Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me”—but Dacus lacks MUNA’s penchant for winking pastiche. This is a straight-up (gay-up?) soft rock album, which might be disappointing for those waiting for a “Night Shift”-level rock moment, but the change suits the warmth of Dacus’s voice. We’re a long way from when the biggest ear candy on a Dacus record was some wide-panned guitar feedback.
The scale feels weirdly small, and not in the way that early Dacus albums felt intimate. Instead, Forever Is a Feeling is Dacus’s most self-mythologizing album yet. When reviewing a record, it’s hard to bring up an artist’s romantic partnerships without seeming like a gossip column. But Feeling relies on parasocial knowledge of Dacus’s life for pathos, all but asking listeners to connect the dots: the album is first and foremost about her relationship with Baker, her boygenius bandmate. Home Video was about real people too, but the songs were beautifully written vignettes before they were 1:1 reflections of reality. A song like “Christine” was about someone specific, but it was more broadly about the grief of losing a female best friend to a mediocre boyfriend; “Most Wanted Man” is, in Dacus’s own words, “about Julien Baker,” and little else. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and the songs work fine enough without that context—yet it’s hard to feel like Dacus is winking at the listener when she references her first encounter with Baker (“you knew when you caught me reading at your show” from opener “Big Deal”) in a near-verbatim reference to an event depicted in their Rolling Stone profile. The little details that power Dacus’s writing can’t help but feel like Easter eggs for listeners as much as writerly flourishes. It’s undeniably personal, but feels pandering.
Beyond the record’s squee-worthy moments, there’s more nuance in the tracks that deal with Dacus’s messy breakup with her pre-Baker partner. Dacus acknowledges that her love for Baker is essentially an emotional affair, and pursuit comes at the expense of both parties’ stable relationships. On “Talk,” an unusually aggressive track by the album’s standards, the collapse of that relationship inspires some of her best lyrics to date: “why was our best sex/ in hotels/ and our worst fights/ in their stairwells” is the kind of concise writing that got Dacus where she is. But the two sides of the album clash rather than complement one another—even if that’s the point, it’s frustrating when only half the album is as complex as Dacus’s capabilities. The best of the love songs, “Come Out,” encompasses the best of both sides, employing a stream of consciousness where Dacus contrasts a clueless board of record executives with her desire to shout about her new lover.
There’s nothing wrong with sappy Sapphic love songs, but if “Sapphic folk” is indeed a genre, it needs to evolve, or the last few years will be relegated to “the queer music boom of the early 2020s,” the same way earnest millennial stomp-clap music is now ripe for parody. All scenes and sounds come to an end, but it’s a shame this one is tied to an entire identity. When Forever Is a Feeling folds ever inward with self-references, it’s clear we’ve reached an endpoint. Culturally, it couldn’t be worse timing when the stagnation dovetails with a massive anti-LGBTQ2S+ backlash—the most groundbreaking album of all time couldn’t survive it. We’ve already seen how easily any mainstream progress can be reversed, and the same is true for music. Yet Jane Schoenbrun, the transfeminine director of I Saw the TV Glow (and director of Dacus’s “Night Shift” video), put this “queer movement” dilemma into perspective when discussing the trans films of last year with Bright Wall/Dark Room: “I’m very skeptical of any narratives that say the moment has arrived, because we’re all in danger and [mainstream] representation unto itself is not something to overinvest emotionally in.” Even at its height, the genre never encapsulated everything: the modern form of “Sapphic folk” has its cis white limitations, as writer Emma Madden correctly pointed out when the label first gained traction. It was never going to be around forever, and maybe it’s time to evolve anyway—after all, most songwriters are more than their orientation.
That said, there’s always a place for songwriters who depict their identity with Dacus’s honesty. Someone will always have a queer awakening, and they’ll awaken into a world that once seemed to accept them but now seeks to erase them from history. We can’t promise that It Gets Better to baby gays anymore, because it might not for a while, especially in the U.S. “Queer Joy” is its own commodified buzzword but it’s also more important than ever. Through that lens, an oxytocin machine about a seemingly real-life fairy-tale love isn’t so bad, an album that often sounds unapologetically made to soundtrack gay weddings when the right to gay marriage is under threat. Forever Is a Feeling works best as a safe haven. As an album, it just feels safe.
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