Lucy Dacus has a knack for taking small, seemingly insignificant details—a car ride, a drink at a bar, an adolescent make-out session—and magnifying them into moments of dramatic self-revelation. Despite its weighty title, though, the singer-songwriter’s fourth studio album, Forever Is a Feeling, takes a less theatrical approach to the quotidian. It’s her most subdued and intimate effort to date, an examination of how, when you’re in love, everyday banalities can be alternately exhilarating and unbearable.
The sleepy pace and strummy arrangements of many of the songs here feel like a step backward in terms of ambition. Forever Is a Feeling features a larger set of collaborators, including Bartees Strange, Blake Mills, her Boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, and Hozier, who lends his smarmy, marble-mouthed voice to “Bullseye.” But with a few notable exceptions, like the pulsating cello-rock rhythm of “Ankles” and the ethereal synth swirl of the title track, the album doesn’t really expand Dacus’s musical palette.
Of course, Dacus isn’t the kind of artist who requires fancy production tricks to make an impression. She can deliver a gut punch with just an acoustic guitar and the perfect clarity that her best lyrics possess. “For Keeps,” for one, is a bittersweet solo acoustic breakup song on which Dacus ponders, “If the devil’s in the details and God is everything/Who’s to say that they are not one in the same?” In keeping with the unguarded style that’s often characterized her songwriting, Dacus is as emotionally open and honest as she’s ever been, if not more so, as she opens a window into the in-between moments of her romantic life.
Even as Dacus fantasizes about kinky sex on “Ankles,” the allure of the morning after seems to be just as strong: “Then help me with thе crossword in the mornings/You are gonna make mе tea/Gonna ask me how did I sleep.” When she’s with the wrong person, she feels as though “the stillness” of these moments “might eat [her] alive,” as she puts it on the disarmingly orchestrated “Limerence.” With the right partner, though, as she explores on “Best Guess,” just “Clasping your necklace/Zipping your dress” takes on an air of epiphany.
“I love your body/I love your mind,” Dacus proclaims on “Best Guess.” It’s one of her less inspired couplets, but that’s okay, because this love is still new, and as such she hasn’t put it through the same level of scrutiny as, say, the teenage crushes she sang about on 2021’s Home Video. For now, it’s just her “best guess at the future.”
Dacus doesn’t seem to pretend that, sooner or later, those little things she revels in now may well start to feel dull or even suffocating. “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,” she muses on “Lost Time,” not long before the otherwise peaceful track builds to a sudden guitar-crunch crescendo. That kind of climax was common on just about all of Dacus’s previous albums, but amid the laidback vibes of Forever Is a Feeling, it hits like a bolt of lightning. Perhaps, then, it’s only a matter of time before Dacus regains her sense of drama.
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