At the end of their set at Forest Hills Stadium on June 17, the rock band Boygenius rolled around on the stage floor — raucous, childlike, alive. Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker tussled, kissed each other, held guitars as easily as toys, seemed so f*cking happy to be there together. It was the kind of show you’ll tell people you attended in 30 years.
There was a crowd, but there could have also not been a crowd. It’s an intimate experience, watching Boygenius perform to thousands. You’re surrounded by people, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like a shared experience among the dozens of girls, gays, and theys wearing merch or Boygenius cosplay — black pleated miniskirts, tailored trousers, white button downs, ties, Reservoir Dog style. The swell of deadshot lyrics screamed in unison came as a surprise every time: She called me a f*ckin' liar (“Emily I’m Sorry”), or sleep in cars and kill the bourgeoisie (“Satanist”). In the quietest moments, like during “Souvenir,” our voices soared together in some kind of haunting, slipping outward and up into the darkening Queens sky. Even then, we were creating our own movies in our own minds, thinking of our own friendships and the lives that got us here, gazing upon the boys with a rapture we felt uniquely as belonging to us alone. A Boygenius song is told with such specificity and closeness it becomes universal and then doubles back around to singularity.
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The band released their first EP in October 2018 after its members befriended each other in the couple years prior; Bridgers and Dacus both opened for Baker in 2016, and Baker thought they “would love each other,” Bridgers told Music Connection. Their friendship as a trio blossomed first over emails and then over five days in June 2018, the only time they’d been in a room together until they started promoting the EP. In the years since, they’ve grown together, chronicling the trajectory of their bond in real-time as it strengthened.
The setlist for Boygenius at Forest Hills, promoting their full-length album The Record, placed all the pieces of that friendship together in a cohesive narrative. The show was part of the Re:SET concert series and featured Bartees Strange, Dijon, and Clairo in the lead-up to Boygenius’s headlining performance. Before they took the stage, Charli XCX’s “Boys” blared over the speakers, and then the lights dimmed as Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town” set the mood for joyous rock ‘n roll energy. Boygenius has begun every show on this tour backstage, huddled over a mic to sing the a cappella “Without You Without Them.” The sweet three-part harmony is a thesis of sorts; it pulls together family history and presents the boys’ friendship as just as fundamental to their becoming as blood.
Much has been written about the themes of friendship in Boygenius’s work already — it’s the foundation, the backdrop for almost every song in their discography. (Even a less obvious one like “Bite the Hand” draws subtle comparisons between real-life relationships and parasocial ones.) But it’s interesting to see how that dynamic plays out in a set full of inside jokes, self-referential lyrical asides, recurring motifs and repeated-with-a-twist lines.
The story of Boygenius unfolded over two hours, unraveling what it is to be known, unraveling a bit of the inscrutability that makes true friendship so extraordinary. But watching a friendship isn’t the same as being inside it, and Boygenius don’t seem to want us to be. Fancams permeate TikTok of Baker and Bridgers pressing foreheads together, or Dacus and Bridgers sharing a kiss. We see the way Bridgers sings “Graceland, Too” to Baker, and the way Baker and Bridgers look on as Dacus sings the gorgeous ballad “We’re in Love.” They’re all approximations of understanding some unknowable intimacy. You can only really understand your own version of things, never somebody else’s.
Boygenius seem to delight in these contradictions. They wrote “Bite the Hand” to call out obsessive fan culture, and then showed live footage of screaming fans as they played it; at Forest Hills, one fan held up a sign asking Dacus for a date. (“I can’t touch you, I wouldn’t if I could,” Dacus sings in one verse.) On “We’re in Love,” Dacus sets a scene of going to karaoke alone to sing the song they wrote about her, and hoping that no one sings along. “I hope I’m not a regular,” the line goes. And the crowd of thousands sang along at full volume on a Saturday night.
Boygenius played “Salt in the Wound” as their final song: “Trick after trick, I make the magic,” they wailed. “And you unrelentingly ask for the secret.” There’s something in that that reminded me of contemporary fan-artist relationships, and this incessant ask for more from the people who play for us. Perhaps that’s what makes Boygenius so cool. Despite how fans may act online or in person at concerts, they’re able to maintain a distance. They show us what they want to show us, they move how they want to move. And still, they fully lose themselves in the songs and in each other. Eyes for themselves alone.
“Salt in the Wound” came to its climax, and Bridgers and Dacus clutched each other to sing of hearts and minds. They staggered around the stage like drunk boys in the night, pulling in Baker, who was desperately trying to maintain her guitar solo. And there they were, the three of them: Baker, all scampering energy, springy like a Call Me By Your Name era Timothée Chalamet, impassioned on guitar. Bridgers, whose consummate cool slowly escalated to a kind of grinning freneticism, kicking her feet like an ecstatic kid after Dacus kissed her. And Dacus with a delicate, deliberate step, hands in her pockets, a statuesque philosopher-king who let go at the last moment to tackle her friends to the ground with love. Boys at the rock show, boys back in town, boys together.
