How boygenius, a Chart-Topping Supergroup, Avoids Toxicity

As a young band taking the stage at Coachella—America’s premier music festival, held mid-April—the trio known as boygenius strides out wearing Gucci suits and ties to Thin Lizzy’s rock anthem “The Boys Are Back in Town.” Quickly, the vibe takes a turn, as Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus exchange verses about how much they love each other. Baker busts out a banjo emblazoned with the words “Queer Joy.” By the set’s explosive final song, “Salt in the Wound,” Bridgers and Dacus tackle each other to the ground while Baker shreds on a guitar solo; they wrestle at Baker’s feet until they finally pull her down with them.

“I’ve never played a festival when the sun was down,” says Baker, still baffled by the excitement a few days later. “I am a small-print gal.” Her bandmates laugh, but the observation is accurate: As an artist’s popularity increases, so does the size of their font on a lineup poster—and boygenius is currently one of the biggest bands in the world.

The group’s first full-length album, the record, which was released two weeks earlier, debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, No. 1 on Billboard’s Vinyl Albums chart and No. 1 on the U.K., Irish and Dutch album charts. They sold out shows around the world and performed in one of Coachella’s top slots—an uncommon feat for a relatively new rock band given the way pop, hip-hop and older-generation artists typically dominate festival headlining spots.

But interest in this trio preceded the release of the album. Baker, 27, Bridgers, 28, and Dacus, 28, were already established as three of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of their generation. Bridgers is the best-known—her Grammy-nominated 2020 record, Punisher, earned her a spot on Saturday Night Live (a performance that became notorious for her vigorous, only partly successful attempt to smash her guitar onstage) and collaborations with the likes of Taylor Swift, SZA and Paul McCartney. The most recent solo projects from Baker and Dacus were both Top 10 hits on the alternative charts.

Joining forces, though, brought them to a new level of success—and a different kind of ambition. When they first assembled five years ago, Baker, Bridgers and Dacus conceptualized the band’s name as a comment on the idea that many men receive constant affirmation from the day they are born. For anyone who is not a cisgender male, to be a “boygenius” is to demonstrate confidence in your ideas when the world has conditioned you to be afraid of them. The name serves as motivation for the group—and if there are rules for rock music, boygenius has achieved success by challenging them all.

To promote their work, the bandmates have taken visual inspiration from some of rock’s most iconic threesomes. For the February 2023 issue of Rolling Stone, they re-created Nirvana’s 1994 cover stance. On the cover of their self-titled 2018 EP, they pose on a couch in the style of the shot on the front of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s debut album.

These choices are a cheeky nod to rock’s history of machismo, even as they set out to embody the exact opposite. “It’s a mission to avoid toxicity,” says Dacus. “I like that people are being forced to think differently about what’s interesting about us. It’s not just sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.”

But the CSN reference is telling, a reminder that rock’s history with “supergroups”—bands in which the members come to the table with successful careers of their own—is fraught with ego clashes and inevitable disappointments. Boygenius seems to have learned that, as demonstrated by the Traveling Wilburys, one of the most legendary supergroups, humor and mutual respect go a long way in a room full of big personalities.

“I don’t think we have the same problems as the rock bands of yore,” says Bridgers. For one thing, all three members identify as queer women—a fact the band avoids dwelling on whenever possible. Regardless of how each member defines herself, this group knows how it wants to be recognized. “What’s remarkable about us,” says Baker, “is how f—ing good we play our instruments and the music that we make.”

On the eve of returning to Coachella for the festival’s second weekend, the boys had wrapped up another busy day. At 8 a.m., they were getting camera-ready for a Zane Lowe interview. In the afternoon, they taped a performance for that night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live; the audience included Bridgers’s mom, wearing a boygenius T-shirt.

Despite a packed schedule, the band is in high spirits when they regroup in Los Angeles a few days after the festival. Baker launches into diatribes on capitalism and the ownership of art. Bridgers jumps up to act out the time a barbecue grill nearly blew up in Baker’s face. Dacus remains practical and measured, frequently steering her bandmates back to the conversation before they’ve completely lost the plot.

Baker, Bridgers and Dacus had met in their early 20s as solo artists ascending the worlds of indie folk and rock. When they were booked on the same tour bill in 2018, the musicians set out to record one single together. They left the studio with six songs, which became the boygenius EP.

“I don’t have a lot of immediate friendships, so it was special for sure,” Bridgers says, recalling the group’s instant connection. They bonded over books, similar “controversial takes on certain musicians” and their shared experiences of instability on the road, a feeling captured on the EP’s spare final track, “Ketchum, ID”—“I am never anywhere, anywhere I go / When I’m home, I’m never there long enough to know.”

Coincidentally, Baker, Bridgers and Dacus each separately opened for indie standard-bearers the National on various tours. “They’re all very distinct artists, but there’s a secret language between them,” says the National frontman Matt Berninger. “To be alone out there in a [state of] focus by yourself can be great, but also it can sometimes feel like you’re in a fishbowl.”

The next few years were defined by accelerating solo careers for all three, but their creative partnership never fully left their minds. On their subsequent albums, Baker says, “We all wrote songs to, for or about our experiences with each other,” and they recorded backing vocals together in Nashville. For many fans, these collaborations (Bridgers’s “Graceland Too” and Dacus’s “Please Stay”) indicated that a fresh boygenius project might be imminent. In reality, the nearly inseparable musicians were stringing their solo albums together.

Shortly after Punisher’s release, Bridgers sent Baker and Dacus a demo of “Emily I’m Sorry,” a song about insecurity and regrets in a relationship (“Emily, forgive me, can we make it up as we go along? / I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am”).

“People say I’m specific in songs in my solo work, but this was so specific,” says Bridgers. “I was like, ‘I think I need my friends around me.’ ”

She wanted the group to handle this song; meanwhile, Baker and Dacus had been wondering who would be the first to ask about getting the band back together. A Google Drive folder titled “dare I say it?” was started, and boygenius’s debut album began to take shape.

The musicians took writing trips to Northern California and Malibu, where they walked in the woods and shared their favorite songs, spending evenings drinking tea, reading and watching movies like The Handmaiden. “I would try to cook an elaborate meal,” Baker recalls about their daily routine, and then Dacus corrects her: “You would cook an elaborate meal.” Her greatest hits are salmon and tofu. “I’m good at proteins. I’m a grill guy,” Baker says.

Lyrics on the record draw from the band’s adventures: a missed exit that added an hour to a road trip, getting pulled under the waves at a public beach. The album also calls back to the 2018 EP. Where Bridgers once sang, “I wanna be emaciated” on “Me & My Dog,” she now sings, “I wanna be happy, I’m ready” on “Letter to an Old Poet.”

The record demonstrates the trio’s fierce admiration for a range of artists. “Not Strong Enough” references Sheryl Crow, a Joan Didion line appears in “Anti-Curse,” and Paul Simon is credited in the liner notes as an “inspiration” for “Cool About It.” (“My mom played ‘The Boxer’ for years in the car,” says Baker, “and it’s wormed into my brain as a second-nature part of my musical vernacular.”) On “Leonard Cohen,” they quote the Canadian bard before tweaking him as “an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry.”

In January 2022, the band recorded the album at Shangri-La in Malibu, working at least 10 hours a day for nearly a month straight with co-producer Catherine Marks, who has collaborated with Alanis Morissette and St. Vincent. The way boygenius communicated with one another was an “inspiring thing to witness,” says Marks. “Decision making is quite efficient because everyone says exactly what they think. I don’t feel like anyone had a dominant voice.”

Dacus notes the differences and the similarities in the role each band member plays. “I think of [Baker] as the musician, and [Bridgers is] the artist, and maybe I’m the writer,” she says. “But we all are musicians, we’re all artists, and we all write.”

As the album neared completion, the boys began meeting with record companies, looking for a bigger outlet than the indie labels that distribute their solo work. (Baker and Dacus are on Matador Records; Bridgers is on Dead Oceans.) Before long, a pattern started to emerge.

“It felt like some of these companies, like, pulled out their woman to talk to us,” Dacus says. “Every single company thought this is what was going to get us, that they have a woman, and it was a little offensive.”

Eventually, boygenius signed with Interscope Records. There were so many people on the first Zoom call that Baker recalls being overwhelmed. But John Janick, chairman and CEO of Interscope Geffen A&M Records, was already a fan. “We knew that we’d have great success with them because the foundation was already there,” he says. Dacus concluded that Interscope “just seemed willing to take risks, and risks that pay off.”

Some of those ideas were smaller in scale, like a South by Southwest pop-up concert at Austin airport’s baggage claim. Another concept was a bit bigger—a short film directed by Academy Award–nominated actor Kristen Stewart. “She was dedicated every waking and sleeping hour to the process,” says Dacus. “She would model for us the blocking or the tone of something. It’s Kristen, and then it’s this full-body communicative machine.”

After doing months of press in the lead-up to “the tour” (as it’s officially called), kicking off June 2, the members of boygenius were energized about finally performing the record live. First, though, Bridgers had to switch into solo mode to open for Taylor Swift on 12 dates. “The craziest thing I could imagine is 60,000 people,” she says. “It’s setting records as the biggest shows ever. It’s so cool to be a part of it.”

All three members of boygenius are navigating new levels of fame, but Bridgers, in particular, has borne the brunt of fans and tabloids obsessing over her whereabouts and dating life. Her personal lyrics and candid social media presence have led some listeners to believe they deserve an all-access pass to her offstage life.

“I’ve had people take more than I’m giving, and I’m giving a lot,” Bridgers says. “I’m pretty f—ing transparent, because I would value that in someone whose music I liked when I was a kid. Seeing any representation of any feeling and anything true was awesome to me. To be punished for that is so dark.”

Bridgers draws a line between fans who share a passing compliment while the band eats lunch and fans who run up to their car, trapping them inside. “There’s a higher chance that you’ll meet a fan that you hate than a fan that you love,” she says. “You’re way more likely to be confronted with someone who just violated your privacy.”

The band has matching tooth tattoos, which are featured on the cover of the record, symbolizing their EP track “Bite the Hand” and serving as a reminder that boundaries are important, even with the people who buy their music.

And when challenges arise, boygenius has couples—or, in this case, throuples—therapy to iron things out. “We keep talking about what we want to protect of each other and of this band,” says Dacus. “Some sessions, we’ve just been complaining about work stuff, and other sessions we’ll each take the mic about our inner worlds. Tension doesn’t actually have to build, because we release it—we’ll just say, ‘Let’s schedule another appointment.’ ”

“Y’all got freaked out because I scheduled one,” says Bridgers.

“Oh, without asking!” Dacus replies, and Baker adds, “I was like, ‘What did we do?’ ”

Bridgers shrugs. “I thought it would be nice.”