If there is a better after-party to England losing the World Cup on Sunday morning than seeing Boygenius play to 25,000 fans, it’s hard to picture it. The US songwriting supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus trade in both intimate commiserations and a celebration of female interdependence that runs counter to the concept of singular male brilliance that gave them their cheeky band name. They chose Irish songwriter Soak, US alt-pop star Ethel Cain and pop trio Muna to support them today: all queer artists, a bill reflected in a very polite crowd primarily comprised of girls, goths and gays (and England shirts). This spiritual sister to Lilith Fair feels like an apt conclusion to a summer defined by women succeeding on an epic scale, from the England squad to blockbuster, headline-dominating tours by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and SZA, to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie painting the box office pink.
Gunnersbury Park is, Baker estimates, the trio’s biggest show ever, and there’s almost something incongruous about it: these three songwriters often sing in close-woven harmonies, and keep a similarly tight lyrical focus, from an imminent ex’s unbearable “keys on the counter, your dirty dish in the sink” in Dacus’s Please Stay, to Emily I’m Sorry, a Bridgers-led track about a crisis in the back seat of a car that seems to shudder with the precariousness of the situation. They have just one EP and an album, this year’s The Record, and many of their Americana-tinged songs proceed with a crushed, under-covers smallness, or a nostalgic dreaminess reminiscent of Sheryl Crow’s 90s hits. Yet the response among the crowd is one of abject hysteria – there are tattoos of Bridgers’ lyrics, and a woman wearing wings to cosplay as the lyric “always an angel, never a god” – reflecting a generational hunger to hear these small, never-ending embarrassments blown up sky-sized. One of the biggest yell-alongs comes in Emily I’m Sorry, as Bridgers sings, “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am.”
