LUCY DACUS STUNS IN STARDOM AT MANCHESTER ACADEMY ON HER SOLD-OUT ‘FOREVER IS A FEELING’ TOUR

LIVE REVIEW | LUCY DACUS w/ jasmine.4.t | MANCHESTER ACADEMY 1 2nd July 2025 by Martha Munro

Last night, forever truly was a feeling among a sea of ecstatic fans as boygenius star Lucy Dacus took to the the iconic Manchester Academy 1 stage. From the queue to the encore, the thrilling energy was almost tangible in the air, and no soul was left untouched by the jaw-droppingly impressive and uniquely personal performance from this blazing star of the modern music world.

jasmine.4.t

Supporting Dacus on tour for the third time running was the brilliant and brash jasmine.4.t, with an act full of fun, feeling and superb style fusions. With a folky violinist and rock-rampant guitar to hand, Jasmine had the entire audience in thrall. Her voice is raw and shouty, perhaps not to everyone’s taste but certainly in keeping with the edgy sound she and her band of ‘four proud trans women’ have fine-tuned so well, melting effortlessly from gentle, percussive numbers like You Are The Morning (during which many audience members held up adorable signs reading ‘You are our morning’) to more gritty rock tunes like Elephant.

The highlight of this home-show support slot however was undoubtedly her final number Did U Know, or more specifically, the moving speech she gave just before this last song – the track itself is about Jasmine’s close friend Yulia Trot, who has been imprisoned without trial since the end of 2024 for taking action against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. As an autistic trans woman in a male prison, without appropriate disability considerations or bail, Yulia is facing extreme injustice every day, something Jasmine and her band wanted to spread awareness about onstage as well as on social media: a page dedicated to Yulia Trot, containing information about her story and ways to support her, is linked in jasmine.4.t’s Instagram bio. The Manchester crowd didn’t disappoint in their unwavering, unanimous solidarity in this sense, with applause, cheers, and a roof-raising chant of ‘FREE, FREE PALESTINE’ – overall, an unforgettable, impactful and promising set to witness from jasmine.4.t.

Lucy Dacus

And it wasn’t long after this that the unmistakable strings of Calliope Prelude and a flood of frantic screams filled the venue – Lucy Dacus was finally here, dressed in pinstripes and a beaming smile. Her first number Hot & Heavy was a flawless opener, filled with drum-founded energy but powered by Dacus’s introspective, illustrative lyrical style, sung in her faultless voice. The atmosphere was honestly like no other, with what seemed like the entire crowd singing at the top of their lungs and shooting huge grins at the equally elated Lucy. 

One of the most memorable characteristics of the show was the detailed set design, clearly heavily inspired by the album artwork from Dacus’s most recent and raved-about album release, Forever Is A Feeling; the artist herself entered the stage through an ancient-Greek-style doorway in the centre of the backdrop, which was designed to look like the wall of an art gallery, with intricate golden picture frames hung across the stage. Inside these were screens that, during Ankles – the second song and lead single from Forever Is A Feeling – began to come to life one-by-one, filling with paintings, and later in the show, stars, cloudy skies, and TV static. During Modigliani, different works by Modigliani himself were displayed, and when Dacus introduced the members of her band, each frame was lit up with a painting of each of the musicians, each in the style of their respective favourite artists.

These stayed onscreen as the band played through a crowd-pleasing fan request of Nonbeliever, a highly climactic song from Dacus’s album Historian. In fact, the night was rife with surprise songs like these, ranging between the different eras of Lucy’s star-studded career, from the sweet, acoustic Cartwheel and Fool’s Gold to an intensely emotional performance of Triple Dog Dare, bathed in pink lights and youthful passions. 

Gliding in and out of the set were nearly all the tracks from Forever Is A Feeling, enveloping the night in the record’s twinkling, twisting, love-laden turmoil, packed full of live variations from the vocals to the strings. Limerence – one of the sadder, piano-founded tracks – featured stars on the screens as well as in the audience: all the phone torches were up and all the tear ducts were well and truly full.

Bullseye was another of the most notable moments of the show; rather than Hozier himself, who sings on the studio version of the song, Dacus invited his ‘cousin’ onto the stage, which turned out to be jasmine.4.t, hilariously adorned in a wild wig and beard. It has to be said that she performed the second verse beautifully, and harmonised with Lucy for a more unique, raw chorus than the one recorded with Hozier.

For the more lively tracks – namely the single Best Guess and the south-soaked Most Wanted Man – the crowd danced as one, energised by the vibrations from the killer drum and bass combo onstage. But the clear winners of the evening were the numbers that held a hidden intensity to them, which reared its head in flurries of vocal mastery and instrumental prowess from Dacus and her band alike. Talk is an obvious example of this, with its delayed choruses that bite into the sound with amped up resentment, heightened again by the gleaming, framed screens, this time showing burning trees.

Another underdog in this sense was Lost Time, which begins as a simple acoustic guitar track but ends in a smashing, intense explosion of heavy, steady rock and regret. As the lights went suddenly from warm to icy, the electric guitar replaced the acoustic, filling the space with a blanket of fuzziness, over which the smashing drums held Dacus’s astonishing vocals at the forefront of the sound. It’s news to no one that Lucy Dacus has an incredibly versatile voice, with a range many successful singers could only dream of. And here, she really showed it off – where the main melody was low and mellow, in this mad last section she brought out her belt, taking the music lines to new heights in a passionate, almost pained final throw: utterly unforgettable.

Probably most highly-anticipated was the show’s encore. As Dacus returned to the stage, the audience practically buzzed with excitement, screaming with joy when those first electric strums of the fan-favourite boygenius track True Blue came humming through the room, dedicated to a couple in the crowd whose first wedding dance was to this song. And if everyone was singing their socks off to this bandtrack, they well and truly lost it for the climax closer, Night Shift. The sheer volume in the Academy was astounding as the band went crazy for this goodnight number, encapsulating the passion of this fandom as a whole: unwavering, undisputed, and unifying.