boygenius’ EP 'the rest' celebrates the little things in life

By Molly Szymanski

On their first full-length release the record, the indie canon’s favorite supergroup boygenius — comprised of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — traipse through heartbreak and loneliness in a whirlwind of emotions cloaked in delicately crafted lyrics, finding solace in love and friendship. A mere seven months since the release of the record, more is to come from the music industry’s most woeful women.

Indie girls, tap in. You know them, you love them and they’re fresh off a back-to-back run at the All Things Go Festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Oct. 1 and Madison Square Garden on Oct. 2. The boys put out their third release, an EP titled the rest, Oct. 13, and if you can believe it, it gets better — twisting and shaping the sadness from their last release into something hopeful.

On “Not Strong Enough,” the fourth and final single off the record, Bridgers introduces the track with the mention of a black hole, setting the scene for four minutes full of anger, disorientation and inferiority. The black hole consumes. It destroys everything in its path. It’s a familiar face on the rest, receiving its own song.

Instead of wreaking havoc this time, the black hole is presented on the release’s first track “Black Hole” as a beacon of opportunity, something that creates. Inspired by a newspaper headline, Baker sings, “You can see the stars, the ones / The headlines said this morning / We're bein' spat out by what we thought / Was just destroyin' everything for good.”

Fans revered the callbacks to the group’s 2018 self-titled EP on the record. Notably, “Letters To An Old Poet” referred back to a track off their self-titled release.  After wishing to be light years away from a bad relationship in “Me and My Dog,” “Letters To An Old Poet”  includes a line about looking at the moon with her dog after freeing herself from the situation.

This concept is not lost on the rest. The theme of being so consumed by a relationship that you lose yourself present on “Emily I’m Sorry” and “True Blue” from the record metamorphosize into newfound freedom on “Voyager” with the lyric, “Walkin' alone in the city / Makes me feel like a man on the moon / Every small step I took was so easy.”

With each iteration of boygenius’ releases, we see themes contorting, collapsing upon themselves and emerging anew, marking a narrative of growth across the three records. Weaving through each other, referencing the one which came before, the supergroup creates an intertwined masterpiece that took this long to come to fruition.

While all three members are featured on every track of the EP, each has “their song,” where they are the focal voice on the track. “Voyager” belongs to Bridgers, “Black Hole” is Baker’s, and the release’s second song, “Afraid of Heights” highlights Dacus.

Arguably the most heart-wrenching lyricist of the trio, Dacus puts forth a narrative of a reckless person juxtaposed to herself: reserved, cautious, yet content. Over simple strums on the acoustic guitar, “Afraid of Heights” is existentialist in nature, begging the question, what is more worth it in life — playing it safe and living a long, albeit milquetoast, existence, or taking risks because the future is uncertain, even if it means putting your life in danger?

Upon hearing boygenius put out a new release, the moderately-informed listener probably assumed they’d be sad. Given the boys’ track record, this is a pretty fair assumption to make.

While the slow, lilting backing tracks on the rest can easily lend themselves to sad girl music, the EP’s lyrics and songs are not depressing in nature. Nihilistic? Maybe. In reality, the rest is an ode to the small things in life: the brushing contact of people entering and exiting each other’s lives. It’s about personhood, existence as a slice of life.

the rest is summed up perfectly in the EP’s final words off the track “powers.” Life is simply “a crooked little trajectory.” When all is said and all is done, among whatever becomes of one person, the human race or the universe, the little things will be all that’s remembered, as all three members sing in unison: “the force of our impact, the fission / the hum of our contact, the sound of our collisions.”