Lucy Dacus’s new album is both a beautiful step forward & a painful look back
Three years after the critical success of her sophomore album Historian, Lucy Dacus has (finally!) released her highly-anticipated third album, Home Video. Promoted by singles “Thumbs”, “Hot & Heavy”, “VBS”, and “Brando”, Dacus’s junior solo project promised to be everything its title suggests: the discovery of dusty adolescent memories unpacked with the wisdom only time can allow.
While both Historian and Home Video nod towards the archival of one’s past, Dacus’s new record feels less like musical documentation and more like liberating (albeit painful) rediscovery. Dacus’s understated single “Hot & Heavy” opens the album, framing what follows as a return to a place of her youth with the opening lines:
“Being back here makes me hot in the face
Hot blood in my pulsing veins
Heavy memories weighing on my brain
Hot and heavy in the basement of your parents’ place”
“Hot & Heavy” centers adolescent uncertainty as Dacus remembers the hidden truths of a teen love. The song’s bridge (“And it happens over and over and over and over again…I wish I was over it, over it, over it, over it”) invokes the image of a VHS tape rewound repeatedly over a single moment, mirrors a repeated rewinding of the tape the album’s title alludes to. If we take this line to speak to the album as a whole, rather than just the subject of the first track, then the album title refers not only to the rewinding of the tape but to the inability to let its contents go; the inexplicable inability to get over the past.
Home Video’s second track “Christine” lays out Dacus’s feelings about a close friend’s relationship with a man who, according to Dacus, doesn’t treat her well. The song details Dacus’s musings on what her friend’s future with this man would look like, concluding with Dacus deciding she would object at their wedding, unable to support the union. Perhaps my favorite non-single on the record, “Christine” is painful and personal, with Dacus’s fragile vocals coasting over soft guitar underscoring the pain of seeing a friend in pain.
Other stand-out tracks from the album include “Thumbs” and “Brando”, both which bowled me over when released as singles. Dacus’s ability to deliver sentiments of brutal honesty with ethereal-soft vocals is on full display in Home Video, more so than in any of her previous work.
Stylistically, Home Video doesn’t stray too far from Dacus’s previous solo work, though it doesn’t have the same kick Historian’s rock features give it. While I was certainly hoping for a bit more punch instrumentally from Home Video, Dacus’s softer approach feels appropriate for an album that tries to parse out the pain and joy inherent in seemingly inconsequential nostalgia.
But Home Video isn’t entirely stuck in the past; Dacus takes the opportunity to use the motif of looking back to hint towards the potential that lies within the future. “Cartwheel”, a song that briefly describes Dacus’s pain at a friend revealing the story of her first sexual encounter, ends thus:
“Now there’s only past and present day
I can’t believe a word you say
The future isn’t worth its weight in gold
The future is a benevolent black hole.”
“Cartwheel” reminds us that the future is forever tied up in pastness, and its subject matter hints at a queer temporality in which time is less linear than we believe. “Please Stay”, similarly, calls the very nature of futurity into question as Dacus addresses a friend struggling to find reasons to continue living. In contrast to “Cartwheel”, in which the future is represented by a cosmic anomaly, “Please Stay” focuses in on the beautiful mundanity of continuing on.
Lucy Dacus’s junior record is a collection of snapshots of an adolescence that feels both familiar and foreign. Home Video is a remarkably cohesive album in its sentiment, subject, and sound, without ever feeling repetitive — a fitting ode to the VHS tapes for which it is named.
Unskippable tracks: “Christine”, “Thumbs”, “Brando”, “Please Stay”
