Nostalgia as a marketing strategy has become so pervasive that it’s easy for us to become skeptical about whether we ever earnestly feel this sentimentality for the past anymore, or if the fond childhood memories that we experience are just subconsciously triggered by scrolling past an ad for, say, the new Rugrats reboot. Which is why Lucy Dacus’s third album, Home Video, a series of deep and wistful real-life vignettes plucked from the Virginia singer-songwriter’s past, feels like something magical.
Across Home Video’s 11 tracks, Dacus doesn’t view the past through rose-colored glasses or much of a filter beyond whatever measure of clarity she’s attained with time and age. The album’s tales of adolescence and young adulthood seemingly tell it how it really was and how it really felt to her: It can feel comforting to return to the past, but as Dacus reminds us, it can also be full of pain, messiness, confusion, and still-unresolved conflict.
Like her Boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, who sing backup on two songs here, Dacus has established a track record of transcending moody-girl-with-a-guitar stereotypes with an ear for dramatic arrangement and a knack for sharp, pop-leaning songcraft. But on Home Video, her songwriting has taken leaps in sophistication and immediacy, beyond even what Bridgers and Baker displayed on their most recent solo efforts.
“Hot & Heavy,” for instance, toys with polyrhythms, featuring layered guitars that alternately sway and chug, its propulsive melody building steadily. “You used to be so sweet/Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street,” Dacus belts, encapsulating the simultaneous discomfort and exhilaration tied to the memories she explores throughout the album.
Ultimately, it’s less the nuances of Dacus’s writing than her willingness to expose herself and her past so freely—even the most difficult parts—that make the strongest impression on Home Video. The spare, plaintive ballads pack just as much wallop as the rockers, as Dacus exposes the most vulnerable moments of her past, like when she grapples with unrequited love and a sudden maturity in the ambling “Cartwheel”: “When you told me ‘bout your first time/A soccer player at the senior high/I felt my body crumple to the floor/Betrayal like I’d never felt before.”
On the sweetly endearing “VBS,” Dacus looks back on meeting her first boyfriend at bible camp, reading his awful poetry, and taking an early stab at rebellion by snorting nutmeg with him. “While you’re going to sleep, your mind keeps you awake…Playing Slayer at full volume helps to drown it out,” she sings, just before a seconds-long blast of heavy, ultra-distorted guitar. It’s the kind of dorky nod that the teenage Dacus probably would’ve thought was cool, which is why its inclusion makes the song seem even more genuine.
Other songs delve into much thornier territory. “First Time” and “Triple Dog Dare” luridly tackle the stress of coming to terms with one’s adolescent sexuality while being raised Christian in the South. But they’re the epitome of politesse compared to the album centerpiece, “Thumbs.” Over nothing more than a low synth drone and a few whooshing sound effects, Dacus recounts an experience she had accompanying a friend to a bar to meet up with the latter’s deadbeat dad for the first time in years. “Honey, you sure look great/Do you get the checks I send on your birthday?” the dad asks flippantly as Dacus silently stews for her abandoned friend. “I would kill him if you let me,” she seethes with chilling stoicism. “I imagine my thumbs on the irises/Pressing in until they burst.”
It’s not easy to remain a sympathetic character once you’ve given a clinical explanation of how you plan to commit murder. “Thumbs” is the clearest distillation of why Dacus does, and it’s also what sets Home Video apart from standard confessional singer-songwriter fare, as the album isn’t actually about her. It’s about other people who have come and gone from her life and shaped her in the process, from old flames on “VBS” and “Going Going Gone,” to old friends on “Thumbs” and the disarmingly direct “Christine,” on which she mourns for a friend who stays in a safe relationship she knows won’t make her happy in the long run: “All in all nobody’s perfect/There may be better but you don’t feel worth it/That’s where we disagree.”
Even on “Brando,” written about someone whose pretentiousness and obsession with obsolescent pop culture drove him and Dacus apart, the song’s breeziness leaves the impression that she’s glad to have known him anyway. It takes profound empathy to write an entire album about your own past and have it turn out to be about your love for others instead.
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