It feels like a lazy cliche to say that an evening was ‘magical’, doesn’t it?
After all, it’s not like Harry Potter showed up and started levitating pints of Carling over Gunnersbury Park. There were no dragons or goblins – and, to the best of our knowledge, each and every person gathered in Gunnersbury on that sunny August evening managed to escape West London without having been cursed by a witch.
Still, there must have been something in the air. After all, that’s the only way we can explain the spell that boygenius – individually known as Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers – cast over their crowd on the night of Sunday, August 20th.
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A more poetic voice than ours might have described the evening as atypically picturesque; a sun-soaked, serotonin-inducing night in the heart of one of this world’s great cities, soundtracked by three of the best singer-songwriters in the world right now.
Sadly, dear reader, we’re not quite that pretentious. What we’ll tell you instead is that boygenius’ first-ever UK headline set was a genuinely special show. It takes guts for anyone to open a supermassive outdoor gig with an acapella rendition of an album track – namely, the ethereal Without You Without Them – but as soon as the trio opened their mouths and crooned the first notes into their microphones, each and every person in attendance decided to shut the hell up and pay attention. And rightly so, frankly – it sounded glorious.
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As the show carried on in a slew of tears, guitar solos, and the kind of public displays of affection that would make your Grandmother blush, it was striking to remember that boygenius have never had a ‘hit’.
They don’t have that one defining track that even casual music lovers would know, and there’s not one song that stood out as ‘the massive singalong’ during their Gunnersbury show. Instead, the crowd greeted every single song with either a roaring bellow of the chorus or the kind of hushed reverence that you might more closely associate with a church service than a stadium-sized concert in London.
Oh, and anyone who came into this show thinking that boygenius was just ‘Phoebe Bridgers and her two friends’ was proven wrong embarrassingly quickly. If anything, it was Dacus and Baker who were the stars of the show: the former could sing your shopping list and bring you to tears, while the latter has seemingly managed to pick up boss-level chops on every instrument under the sun in her 27 years on this earth.
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And, with a flurry of fireworks and the closing notes of Salt in the Wound, it was over.
Emotional reserves had been drained, and at least a handful of members of the front row were spotted exiting the vicinity with tears rolling down their cheeks. Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker shared one final embrace and exited the stage with a wave, and the fields of West London lay in silence once more.
As for our verdict? Well, dear reader, if you ever find yourself craving an evening of luscious harmonies, gorgeous indie-folk songs, and the kind of genuine bond between bandmates that you can only form by spending way too much time together, you could do a lot worse than going to a boygenius show. It might not have been magic, but there was something in the air – and we suppose the only way for you to understand it is to see it for yourselves.
