Review: Lucy Dacus — Forever Is A Feeling

Lucy Dacus
Forever Is A Feeling
Geffen Records
Street: 03.28.2025
Lucy Dacus = Adrianne Lenker + Soccer Mommy 

Sometimes, the seconds before a kiss can feel like hours. Days and weeks stretch into agonizing years while waiting for somebody to make the first romantic move in a homoerotic friendship. When it finally happens, time stops. It’s bliss. But it’s also hell. Forever is a feeling that three-time Grammy Award-winning former boygenius member Lucy Dacus knows full well. 

Boldly asserting a bittersweet truth in the title of her forthcoming fourth studio album, set to release on March 28, Forever Is A Feeling, Dacus posits that eternity is simply an emotion we experience, inspired by the overwhelming throes of love. As our generation’s leading philosopher on queer yearning, Dacus unravels the complex pain and pleasure brought on by multifaceted and ambiguous relationships, where discerning the mystery of it all – while sidestepping hidden emotional landmines – often overshadows the romance itself. Unreciprocated longing can feel endless, while new love fuels our vigor to commit for the rest of time – but when things end, we discover permanence is an illusion we merely craft to make sense of these feelings larger than ourselves.

Taking the time to relish in the mundane, the album’s deeper themes don’t feel pretentious but playfully dabble in Americana similar to Lana del Rey’s songwriting quips in recent years; tenuous love is a daily pack of cigarettes; a friend stops to explain limerance between taking hits from a blunt; a pair blush with red while sitting in a fores in t green 1993 Grand Cherokee. Dacus’s elaborate storytelling in short morsels with simple guitar, violin, and piano accompaniments cements her voice as the most commanding instrument in her arsenal, making her wish to confess, “scream her throat raw” and share her feelings – even if she can “never sing again” – the kind of crazy gesture only deep (or painful) love can inspire.

During a trip to Los Angeles in December 2023, I drunkenly met Dacus by chance at Bar Flores in Echo Park. After recognizing her from across the room, I noticed her standing next to a platinum blonde as I made my way to the counter where she stood – with none other than Phoebe Bridgers. After making small talk, I embarrassingly explained that “Christine” was my favorite track on Home Video, after listening countless times and crying over a boy I loved – whom I’d never tell. Dacus warmly encouraged my delusional ass by sharing “the secret,” which was that she got with her muse after writing the song. Bridgers chimed in and told me that I “had to tell him” how I felt. 

Of course, shamefully, I never did as they encouraged, but that song catalogs exactly how Dacus’ follow-up album marks the development of her character and songwriting. Growing up is learning that sometimes, it’s not meant to be – even if the feelings are there. On “Big Deal,” she celebrates and laments both a feeling of relief and disappointment after receiving a romantic confession. As Dacus concedes they know it would never work out, she expresses profound love through a willingness to let go: “You’ve got your girl, you’re gonna marry her / and I’ll be watching in a pinstripe suit, sincerely happy for the both of you.” It’s impossible not to feel a sense of pride and a twinge of pain, seeing her mature from the crazed romantic who once swore in 2021 “but if you get married, I’d object, throw my shoe at the altar and lose your respect.” 

But Dacus adeptly captures love’s inseparable despair and hope, which remain present throughout the entire album – even overthinking, shrinking back and bargaining while laying out visions her horny fantasies. “What if we don’t touch? What if we only talk about what we want and cannot have?” In a world where queer love is still criminalized at worst and tokenized at best, Dacus takes care to illustrate that this tension is also largely driven by external pressures – most vividly in the video for “Ankles.” 

The montage features Dacus in an ethereal, Enchanted-Princess-Giselle-like role, alongside Havana Rose Liu – widely known for her portrayal as a sapphic Regina George archetype in Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennot’s 2023 lesbian comedy Bottoms – who plays a protective partner. As Liu struggles to keep her otherworldly and oblivious lover safe from threats in the outside world, our hearts break by the end of the video, witnessing Dacus return to a painting she must’ve escaped from, leaving Liu with only an image to pine after.

Creating this liminal space between romance and friendship after experiencing the lockstep dance to survive it all, Forever Is A Feeling, could be Dacus’s most romantic album to date. But for the “Night-shift” singer, this type of love album falls entirely opposite the dizzying bliss and romantic fervor of Caroline Polachek’s Desire I Want to Turn Into You – instead solemnly capturing the intimate details of passing moments between agonizing slow-burns and ill-fated endings. Ripe and juicy watermelon pulp drips down her lover’s neck – but hardly compares to the sweet taste of brine after kissing crying eyes on “Bullseye,” a strong contender for fan favorite. The track features Hozier, who mourns losing simple things and never reaching fulfillment: “I miss borrowing your books to read your notes in the margin / the closest I came to reading your mind.” 

Closing her philosophy lecture, Dacus warns against wasting even a single day harboring unspoken love on the final track “Lost Time,” a sort of “Carpe Diem” manifesto only those who have loved and lost can fully understand. “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.” According to the Lucy Dacus school of queer love, the question “is it better to speak or to die?” from Marguerite de Navarre’s The Heptameron – popularized by Luca Guadanigno’s Call Me by Your Name – has a simple answer. Don’t waste time. —Arthur Diaz 

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