For the last few years, Lucy Dacus has been introduced with an asterisk – being one-third of boygenius. The group became a cultural force almost instantly, but long before it, she had already built something quieter and enduring.
In fact, her solo debut came a decade ago, with No Burden. Originally self-released before being picked up and reissued by Matador Records in early 2017, the record quickly positioned her as a sharp, emotionally precise songwriter, well before boygenius entered the picture.
She followed with 2018’s critically lauded Historian, then the 2019 EP, 2021’s Home Video, and her latest record – 2025’s Forever Is a Feeling. While boygenius releases came simultaneously in 2018 and 2023, you can sense that her solo work is its own universe.
Forever Is a Feeling was written gradually over several years. Many songs were conceived shortly after Home Video, evolving through 2022 and 2023 before being recorded in 2024. By the time it arrived in 2025, Dacus says it felt like a carefully kept journal. “It was cooking for a really long time,” she reflects, in a new interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “It was a labour of love.”
“Boygenius took up a tonal space with sounds and themes that felt very different,” she continues. “If I didn’t have that, I probably would have incorporated more harsh or rock or intense things [into Forever Is a Feeling]. The album felt like my personal antidote, there was a different consideration going into it.”
What distinguishes Forever Is a Feeling from much of her earlier work is a deepening of trust in herself and the listener. To Dacus, songwriting has felt like a way to make sense of feelings as they arrive – feelings she can then share outward. “Once you’re honest about your feelings, you have to grieve all the time that you weren’t honest… so you can live the life that you deserve or you actually want,” she says of closing track “Lost Time”.
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The record allows contradictions to sit side by side, rather than resolving them. Love and regret, tenderness and distance, certainty and doubt all coexist. It resists a tidy conclusion, mirroring a moment in her life where she’s comfortable not knowing what comes next.
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The quiet confidence, grounded in honesty and that comfort with the unknown, carries into her live shows. Among her recent Australian run, there was one show in particular that stood out to Dacus as a personal milestone: playing the Sydney Opera House. “It was amazing. That’s the building I’ve seen my whole life. Just being in the round, the energy was bouncing off everyone.”
These kinds of solo milestones matter greatly to her, she says, carrying a different emotional weight to the whirlwind success of boygenius and the group’s milestones – like winning three Grammy Awards.
“It’s completely just a different thing. I feel like the way that people reacted to boygenius was overwhelming to the point of [being] a detriment to all of our health and awesome at the same time,” she says. “It was one of those things that’s like, I couldn’t live like this my whole life but also I’m really glad people are responding well to the thing that we care about.”
“[But] it feels bigger to be playing the Opera House and Laneway,” Dacus continues. “The people who’ve been paying attention since the beginning are so many more chapters into whatever this book is. I could never have guessed this, but the more I do music, the more rich I feel my relationships are to the people that are still listening.”
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Even after years of international acclaim, this idea – that people on the other side of the world care so deeply about her music – still feels faintly surreal. “I can visualise threads between everyone all over the globe,” she says.
“It’s always so dreamy to be here, it really feels like people really care, if I can go this far from home and people are still showing up, like it doesn’t really make sense.”
Her music, she adds, isn’t special because it belongs to her; it’s special because it belongs to everyone who finds meaning in it. “You could sub out my music for anything else people love. It just makes me aware of how connected we are by the things that we love. That’s such a good reminder that I get to have, I think, more than most people, so very blessed.”
That sense of shared connection extends beyond her solo work, inevitably leading back to boygenius – the project that has come to define her just as deeply, albeit in a different way. While the group’s meteoric rise introduced Dacus to a vastly expanded audience, it ultimately reinforced her belief of music gaining meaning through the people who carry it.
Together, they bring her story full circle, reminding us that the asterisk she’s often introduced with was never the whole story.
