Last February, the American “indie rock supergroup” Boygenius – AKA Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – announced an indefinite hiatus. The announcement came a couple of weeks before their solitary album, The Record, won three of the seven Grammys for which it had been nominated. This was a suitably triumphant ending to a project that had been garlanded with acclaim, both for their music – “at the vanguard of keeping rock alive,” as one US magazine editor put it – and their willingness to indulge in attention-grabbing gestures, frequently designed to prick at the male domination of rock history.
Their debut EP came in a sleeve that referenced that of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s eponymous 1969 album. They dressed as the Beatles for an appearance on Saturday Night Live and as Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone. Onstage, they snogged each other, ripped open their shirts and discussed free-bleeding menstruation. They appeared at a Tennessee festival dressed as drag queens, complete with names – including the impossibly winning Queef Urban – to protest against the state banning public drag performances. The memes piled high. By the time the project drew to a close, all three members were substantially more famous than they had been at its inception; Dacus was even namedropped in the title track of Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department.
