THE MAGIC OF LOVE: LUCY DACUS’ ‘FOREVER IS A FEELING’
ALBUM REVIEW | LUCY DACUS – FOREVER IS A FEELING by Martha Munro
Throughout the stardusted career of singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus there has never been a lack of honesty or songwriting skill. The artist herself has even said that she sees herself more as a writer than a musician. But with her new 2025 studio album, Forever Is A Feeling, released 28th March, Dacus brings both her music and musings to stunning new heights, melting the classical with the modern in a dazzling, diaristic, deeply evocative piece of work.
Lucy Dacus reached the height of her thus-far-fame in 2023 as a member of the sensational American supergroup boygenius, who released their Grammy-winning studio album the record that year and quickly shot to the tops of playlists around the world. Since the beginning of the band’s ongoing hiatus, fans have been eagerly anticipating Dacus’s next musical move – and it’s safe to say that Forever Is A Feeling, in all its decadent entirety, will not disappoint.
The album is interwoven with artistic, religious and literary allusions, the first of which can be seen in Calliope Prelude. This first track is purely instrumental, a short, balletic movement of strings. One violin becomes two, before a sea of them join in to take their own different, yet harmonic and beautiful paths, evoking a full-body feeling even in the album’s first breaths. According to Greek mythology, ‘Calliope’ was the eldest of the muses and the goddess of eloquence and epic poetry – no coincidence there. Everything about the lyricism throughout the record to come is epically, evocatively crafted.
These strings flow straight into the following track Big Deal, a sentimental song full of love and regret alike. It’s led by a strummed acoustic guitar and steady drumbeat, with the quiet additions of piano lines, warped electric guitar and blurry harmonies, fostering an irresistible combination of the subtle and the grand. Here, Dacus really demonstrates her ability to make the simple sound surreal, playing with the dynamics and creating a hypnotically smooth style that sets the tone for the whole album.
Next up are two pre-released singles, Ankles and Limerence, widely loved and critically acclaimed since their release in January. Ankles, the livelier of the two, comes first, and violins introduce the song with staccato pulls of the bow, joined only by Dacus’s isolated vocals; an immediate sense of anticipation is established. Then the song’s character starts to fully shine through: a thudding bass drum enters as Dacus sings ‘So bite me,’ establishing the track’s endearing playfulness and more curious, sexual themes, the lyrical and sensual intertwining just as the keys and the strings do, swirling through the delicate power of the chorus. An instrumental break follows, led by the almost magical picking of an acoustic guitar. Overall, Ankles has an air of wonder about it, a sense of otherworldliness amid human happenings – a stunning, born-to-be single.
Limerence is an immediately more balladic, piano-founded, piercingly emotional piece. Throughout, the piano is just beautiful, with depth in the lower chords and lightness in the higher, arpeggio-like runs, coupled yet again with a harmonic line of orchestral strings. These reduce to isolate the held piano chords as Dacus sings ‘I’m thinking about / Breaking your heart someday soon,’ emphasising the sense of lost love and turmoil that powers the song. The strings return, but only in faint grasps, perhaps to convey a sense of unrequited yearning, a distance between the writer and the muse. The dramatic, classical style really elevates this song as one of modern tragedy, a stark contrast to the preceding Ankles yet retaining that atmosphere of wonder.
Following these singles is the immediately more energised track Modigliani, presumably named after the 20th century Italian painter. Like Ankles, this song’s introduction is anticipatory and mysterious, only this time the beat comes from a synth bass rather than violins. It’s packed with desire, yearning and an intermittent, idyllic harp, smattering the soundscape with its cascading, water-droplet strings and meshing with those of the acoustic guitar. boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers also gets a feature on this song, harmonising with Dacus as they do so well.
The next and most recent single Talk is up next, which is a much darker, more intense take on Dacus’s otherwise lyrical style. A whistle-like effect reels the music in, comprised at first of only an acoustic guitar and Dacus’s characteristic, double-layered vocals. Here, we immediately get a new sense of intensity with the artist’s husky voice, expressing uncertainty, anxiety, a communication breakdown. This intensity only increases as more abstract sounds start to surround the music like a gathering wind, built up by a warped bass drum and eerie harmonies. It has an Ethel Cain-esque blurriness to it – the music itself seems to have emotions in this track, for example, in the silences right before Dacus sings the word ‘talk,’ highlighting her breath, her fear, her turmoil. The song features an outstanding crescendo towards the end, with higher harmonies, higher amp settings, and higher intensity: a flawless feat of musical mastery.
Immediately more balladic, simplified number, For Keeps, an endearing, intimate love song that showcases Dacus’s lyricism: ‘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.’ It’s simple, short and sweet, and it doesn’t need any bells and whistles to be deeply moving. Following on is the title track Forever Is A Feeling, which immediately picks the pace up again, with a running piano that’s almost childlike in its playfulness. This is soon thickened with a bassline and drums, intentionally building up a sense of anticipation and excitement. And the most exciting thing about the track is by far its unpredictability: keys change, sections blur, and still it remains harmonious and grand.
One of the aspects of the album that’s not only important to Lucy Dacus herself, but also to her fans, is her artistic expressions of queer love. This album takes a loud, proud and endlessly loving approach to this part of the music, demonstrated in the aptly named Come Out. The song features clear allusions to queerness and a subsequent feeling of isolation. However, Dacus defeats this with love; it’s embodied in the waltz of the track, peppered into the grand, orchestral harp, and it rings out in every word sung.
Last single Best Guess is another that beautifully expresses queer love and joy, as well as nailing that impactful simplicity once again. The mellow electric guitar is what really brings this number to life, capturing sweetness by adding playful flairs here and there. The love-brimming lyrics track parts of a friends-to-lovers relationship, reaching a heavenly highlight in the bridge: ‘Here is the church / Here is the steeple / You were looking for saints / But you only found people.’ This epitomises what the music of Lucy Dacus is all about: finding and expressing the beauty in the most human things. The bass is deep and smooth, the percussion is fun and fresh, and the singer is elated in the quietest and loudest parts of her love alike.
Bullseye, featuring Hozier, is outstanding. The tones of both artists melt together effortlessly, with so much sensitivity and individual flair. The two have performed together a handful of times, and their working on a studio project together is nothing short of a gift, full of love and talent. An easy, smooth guitar line starts off the song, immediately evoking an inexplicable kind of sentimentality. Briefly, this strumming style becomes deeper and more syrupy when Dacus leads the first verse and sings ‘I always loved the way you play guitar’ – a gorgeously personal pocket. The added vocal layer in the chorus is distant, embodying a sense of yearning, which is emphasised in the main vocal lines too. Dacus expertly plays with the dynamics in her voice to invoke more emotional inflections, and equally emotive are Hozier’s vocals, which lead the second verse and fit perfectly into the acoustic style, full of honeyed control and passion. They go on to harmonise, and it’s almost unbelievable how good their voices sound together. You can really understand why this collaboration was the one Dacus wanted on the record – these two together are a god-send.
The penultimate track, Most Wanted Man, is a bound-to-be fan favourite, taking on a new country-rock style as an ode to Lucy Dacus’s girlfriend and bandmate, Julien Baker, whose music is rooted in the Tennessee country scene and also features on the track later on. Dacus’s musical expertise is really shown off in this number, as, rather than abandoning her established style for this new one, she moulds the song into a combination of the two, adding stylistic diversity while still maintaining the album’s golden thread. The grit of the Fleetwood-Mac-esque guitar meets the soft power of Dacus’s voice, characterised by her fun, lilting melodies and rhythms. An intense climax of drums brings the song into its brilliantly built-up bridge: ‘If it’s not god it’s fate / If it’s not fate it’s chance / And if it’s chance I’m gonna take it.’
And for the final track, Lost Time, Dacus begins by bringing it back to the basics with the simple duet of her and her acoustic guitar. Throughout Forever Is A Feeling, this formula never feels repetitive, which is a hard thing to achieve on such a consistently connected album. It’s a domestic picture of love that she’s painting here, full of found sounds like chirping birds and windchimes. A gentle drum pattern enters too, and softly carries the verse into the chorus, framing the images of unabashed closeness and precious love. The bridge is smooth and hypnotic, heightening the conflict between joy in love and regret over 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.’ And later on, it becomes strikingly clear why this song had to be the album’s last; suddenly, a drumbeat crashes the sound into a Talk-like intensity, with amped-up billows of slow-motion, steady bass and electric guitar lines. And after the climax, the denouement hits the heart straight on. At the very end, the sound reduces only to a fuzzy voice-memo snippet of Dacus singing what must be a first version of the track, putting the album’s deeply intimate nature on display and getting that bit closer to the listener before the music stops.
Across Forever Is A Feeling, Lucy Dacus takes the listener through the ins and outs of love, soundtracked by an often fantastical, always sensational tapestry of music. There’s truly not much else to say – it’s a no-brainer must-listen for everyone this spring.
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