Lucy Dacus has announced her highly anticipated fourth studio album, Forever Is A Feeling. The cover art is a painting of Dacus by acclaimed visual artist Will St. John and contributors for the album include Hozier, Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Blake Mills, Bartees Strange, Madison Cunningham, Collin Pastore, Jake Finch and Melina Duterte.
While Dacus’s last album, Home Video, explored the world of childhood and adolescence. Forever Is A Feeling is decidedly adult. The lushness of the album’s sound is matched by a new frankness in Dacus’s approach to sexuality and romance. “So bite me on the shoulder, pull my hair,” Dacus sings on “Ankles.” “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed, and take me like you do in your dreams.” The sex in “Ankles” remains fantasy—as in many of the songs, love doesn’t come easy, desire has to be resisted—but the willingness to talk about it shows a new forthrightness, a new and brave willingness to express desire. The song was originally written as a ballad, Dacus says, but on the album melancholy has been transfigured. Pulsing strings build to a thick texture of drums, guitars, a dancingly exuberant bass line, and electronics. Frustration becomes flirtatious, playful, full of the excitement of shared attraction.
Most of the songs on Forever Is A Feeling were written between Fall 2022 and Summer 2024. “I got kicked in the head with emotions,” says Dacus. “Falling in love, falling out of love.” She had to make peace with the price of the love she wanted. “You have to destroy things in order to create things. And I did destroy a really beautiful life.”
Forever is a feeling—and maybe only a feeling. But that’s not to say it’s nothing. Back to the Will St. John painting, where the album’s title appears tattooed across Dacus’s chest. Tattoos are permanent marks, we think, but they can only last as long as the flesh they’re written on. “You can’t actually capture forever,” Dacus says. “But I think we feel forever in moments. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent in forever, but I know I’ve visited.” Love ends, tattoos fade, flesh falters; even paintings and songs aren’t forever, not really, though these songs will last a long time. To love another mortal being is to cast one’s lot with the temporary.
