Lucy Dacus has always excelled at turning everyday moments into something meaningful. From the raw heartbreak of “Night Shift” to the nostalgic explorations of 2021’s “Home Video,” her ability to find profundity in small details has made her previous albums resonate deeply. It’s this quality I found myself occasionally missing while sitting with “Forever Is A Feeling,” her fourth album and first for Geffen Records.
It’s not that this record lacks moments of brilliance. They’re here, scattered like loose change between the couch cushions of more forgettable tracks. The album opens with “Calliope Prelude,” an instrumental string arrangement that swells with cinematic tension—a bold choice that suggests Dacus isn’t interested in recycling old tricks. Fair enough. Artists should evolve. But when “Big Deal” follows with its mid-tempo meditation on watching an ex move on (“And we both know that it would never work/ You’ve got your girl, you’re gonna marry her”), the absence of those hooks that made previous album openers so immediately compelling becomes noticeable.
Maybe that’s the point, though. “Forever Is A Feeling” isn’t about dramatic ruptures or nostalgic excavations—it’s about the messy middle of adult relationships, that space where the extraordinary becomes ordinary and vice versa. Dacus has certainly earned the right to explore this territory. Fresh off Grammy success with boygenius (the supergroup she shares with her partner, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, both of whom appear on this record), she’s no longer the indie darling but a legitimate star grappling with visibility and vulnerability in equal measure.
When it works, it’s magical. “Ankles” shimmers with strings and synths as Dacus sings about desire with the frankness of someone who’s stopped caring what the church crowd might think: “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed / And take me like you do in your dreams.” There’s a delicious tension between the song’s dreamy arrangement and its carnal subject matter. Similarly, “Limerence” pairs restlessness against delicate piano while Dacus contemplates blowing up a relationship: “I’m just shoveling popcorn in my mouth / So I don’t say the things that I’m thinking out loud.” It’s a relatable moment of restraint.
But for every moment that clicks, there’s another that slips through your fingers like water. “Modigliani” drifts pleasantly enough, but despite Bridgers on harmonies, it never quite finds its shape. “Talk” builds toward a climax that never fully materializes, which feels especially frustrating given the horror-movie strings that suggest something more explosive is coming. The title track, despite its all-star roster of contributors (Bridgers, Baker, Madison Cunningham, and Bartees Strange), settles for being pretty when it could have been transformative.
Maybe that’s why the ballads end up stealing the show. Stripped of production flourishes, songs like “For Keeps” can’t hide behind arrangement—they live or die on the strength of Dacus’s words. And what words they are: “If the devil’s in the details, then God is in the gap in your teeth/ You are doing the Lord’s work every time you smile at me.” Then comes the kicker: “But I still miss you when I’m with you/ ‘Cause I know we’re not playing for keeps.” It lands with quiet precision. Similarly, “Come Out” weaves harp and toy piano into a dream state where Dacus repeats, “I miss you, I miss you, I miss you in my arms,” with an unguarded honesty that reveals the vulnerability beneath her typically measured delivery.
The Hozier collaboration “Bullseye” presents an interesting contrast. Their voices complement each other well enough, but his presence feels somewhat disconnected from the intimate world Dacus has constructed throughout the album. Much more successful is “Most Wanted Man,” where Baker’s backing vocals and Blake Mills’s jagged guitar work create the perfect backdrop for Dacus’s most urgent delivery on the record. When she sings “I promise anything you give to me is something I will keep,” you believe her completely.
Album closer “Lost Time” nearly salvages the record’s more meandering moments, building from intimate observations (“I hear you singing in the shower/ It’s a song I showed you years ago”) to a crashing finale that recalls the cathartic power of her best work. When she reverses course and ends with the demo version, it creates a strange time-warp effect—as if to suggest that underneath all the production choices, her songwriting remains fundamentally unchanged.
That’s the weird contradiction at the heart of “Forever Is A Feeling.” For an album ostensibly about the transformative power of love, it feels strangely tentative—neither fully embracing nor rejecting the changes that come with artistic success and personal evolution. There’s a line in “Best Guess” where Dacus declares “I love your body/ I love your mind,” a sentiment so straightforward it almost seems beneath a songwriter of her calibre. But maybe the album’s occasional plainspokenness isn’t a flaw but an honest reflection of how love flattens our complexities.
I keep thinking about something Dacus sings on “Lost Time”: “Nothing lasts forever, but let’s see how far we get/ So when it comes my time to lose you/ I’ll have made the most of it.” In its best moments, “Forever Is A Feeling” captures that peculiar sensation—knowing something precious is ultimately temporary but choosing to sink into it anyway. It’s not Dacus’s strongest collection, but I can’t shake the feeling that its imperfections might be the point. Love resists neat categorization; why shouldn’t an album about love do the same?
Forever Is A Feeling is set to release March 28th
Share this :
