If Lucy Dacus sounded forthright on her first few albums, she circumvents any remaining filters on her latest. For all Dacus’ directness as she parsed, say, a flinty breakup on “Night Shift,” from 2018’s Historian, or wrestled with the ambivalence she felt about adulthood throughout 2021’s Home Video, the Virginia-born singer and songwriter goes even further on Forever Is a Feeling.
Dacus wrote the songs on her fourth LP concurrently with events happening in her life, which lends a diaristic, voiceover-style feel to the album, almost as if she’s letting listeners hear her internal monologue in real time. Along with the considerable success of boygenius, her band with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, one of the main events in Dacus’ life over the past few years seems to have been falling in, and out of, and in love, maybe all at once. She captures the queasy, butterflies-in-your-stomach sense of it all with such clarity that you sometimes feel like you’re the one in the grip of a deep infatuation.
Though Dacus has never shied away from themes of physical intimacy or desire, she’s more frank than ever about them here. While the pop-culture tendency lately to describe anything sexual as “horny” feels juvenile, Dacus doesn’t hold back on “Ankles” when she suggestively describes what she wants to do, and have done to her, in bed (“Bite me on the shoulder, pull my hair / And let me touch you where I want to”; “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed / And take me like you do in your dreams”). She brings a similar sense of impulsive romanticism to “Come Out,” where she imagines “screaming my favorite things about you” in the middle of the street until her throat is raw, to the consternation of any toddlers and “scandalized moms” there to bear witness. Not only is she more direct, she’s more candid. In the past, Dacus has addressed romantic partners, or crushes, only as “you,” without many other identifying characteristics. On “Best Guess,” she offers specifics about who “you” might be when she describes zipping up someone’s dress and kissing their neck.
For all her exuberance on those tracks, Dacus hasn’t escaped from episodes of self-doubt. A certain diffidence frames her lyrics on “Limerence,” where she wonders about the tradeoff between “life as I planned it” and the possibility of feeling stifled. Even through the buzz of newfound passion, she’s regretting not having made her feelings clear sooner on “Lost Time,” the album closer, where she sings accompanied only by acoustic guitar at first, until keyboards and drums seep in subtly as the song progresses. By the end, the song splices seamlessly into what sounds like it could have been the demo version, with scratchy acoustic guitar and Dacus’ voice, which lends a full-circle feel to the track, and also the album.
Not only does Dacus take a more immediate lyrical approach on Forever Is a Feeling, she broadens her musical palette here too, right from the start. The first track, “Calliope Prelude,” features the baroque ebb and flow of a single violin that expands, prism-like, into layers of sound. It sets the tone for the album, on songs full of lush textures. Sometimes they’re fairly standard, as in the guitars, bass, keyboards and drums on “Big Deal.” Elsewhere, the arrangements are more distinctive: “Modigliani” opens with a springy synth-bass sound that’s quickly joined by violin and squiggles of keyboards, while “Bullseye” features a complete novelty in the Dacus solo canon. It’s a duet, featuring tousled vocals from Hozier, who sings atop a bed of hushed harmonies. He’s one of several guests on Forever Is a Feeling, including Bridgers and Baker, along with Blake Mills, Bartees Strange, Madison Cunningham, Melina Duterte and Phoenix Rousiamanis, a bandmate of jasmine.4.t’s (whose debut album was co-produced by Dacus) who helped push musical boundaries here with violin and keyboards.
It’s an impressive roster of guests, but their real function here is helping Lucy Dacus to sound like the purest version of herself. Yes, she is doing things a little differently with more expansive musical arrangements and more specific lyrics. In the end, though, Forever Is a Feeling is the next step forward from an artist who continues to discover who she is, and what kind of music she wants to make, which is the sort of journey that hopefully will last for her entire career.
Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.
