On June 25th, Lucy Dacus released Home Video, her third studio album. I’ve been a fan of Dacus since I heard her first single back in 2016, “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore,” a song which explores the niche yet relatable experience of being the “funny one” and how that impacts one’s sense of identity. I was so taken by that song in particular that I began following her career in earnest, and she has yet to disappoint. I was obsessed with her sophomore album, Historian—I think I’ve listened to the song “Night Shift” over 100 times at this point—and I’m also a big fan of Boygenius, the sad!queer supergroup Dacus formed with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers.
Needless to say, I was fully primed to love her new album, and I’m pleased to report that it still managed to exceed my expectations. With Home Video, Dacus shifts the lens from the present to focus on her suburban Christian upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, and how those memories and romantic entanglements inform the person she’s become. It’s a crush of nostalgia, confusion, naivete, and burgeoning queerness, and it’s proof that Dacus has hit her stride.
Home Video opens with “Hot & Heavy,” one of the album’s four singles and a perfect example of the type of bittersweet indie pop-rock song Dacus is an expert at crafting. It immediately grabs the listener and lets us know what we’re in for, kicking off with a chorus that could serve as a thesis for the entire album:
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
A lot of what Dacus is exploring with Home Video is that exact feeling of returning to your hometown, the near-assault of memories around every corner that make you feel like a teenager again. Things you thought you were over come rushing back like you’re feeling them for the first time, and then you find yourself speeding down the streets of your youth, driving your mother’s car and blasting, I don’t know, Arcade Fire with the windows down (or is that just me?).
So many of the songs focus on the relationships of Dacus’ youth, the clumsiness of them, the idealization of those love interests at the time with a heavy dose of reflection from her present self. Dacus seems to be reaching out to a younger version of herself in the way we do sometimes, trying to tell her what we can never actually tell ourselves: you have no idea how much this person is going to break your heart. “Hot & Heavy” reckons with seeing that person again as an adult, noting the ways in which you’ve both changed and how what you shared was special, but other songs are more bitter than sweet.
“Brando” in particular is a song that speaks to me on a spiritual level re: My Worst High School Boyfriend. The song, another one of Home Video’s singles, recounts a relationship many of us have had as teenagers with someone who thinks themselves wise beyond their years, an old soul who skips school to go to the movies and quirkily reenacts scenes from classic films; as Dacus so aptly sums it up, “You say, "Here's lookin' at you, kid" / Thinking I wouldn't understand the reference.” Clearly, this is one of the relationships that hurts her looking back, and her lyrics are not forgiving. She sings, “You called me cerebral, I didn't know what you meant / But now I do, would it have killed you to call me pretty instead?” The chorus is one I would have loved to sing along to, weeping, at the worst moments of my first heartbreak: “All I need for you to admit is that you never knew me / Like you thought you did.”
Something about Home Video that does not apply to my own experiences but which I found incredibly interesting and emotionally complex is the way it weaves Dacus’ Christian upbringing into the songs. It’s not that any of the songs are exclusively about that experience in and of itself, but it is an ever-present part of the album, as Dacus was not just raised Christian but was also devoted to Christianity in a very real way. The song “VBS,” titled for “Vacation Bible School,” is perhaps the most explicitly about this Christian youth group culture, but the song is still equally about a crush, and the cognitive dissonance it requires to be a teen devoted to religion who also wants to, you know, do teen things.
It’s interesting that there aren’t any straight-up indictments of this part of her youth, an indication that Dacus is still wrestling with what faith means to her and what role it plays in her life now (she’s said as much in interviews about the album). Still, it’s clear that this ideology had the effect of stifling parts of her identity, especially when it comes to queerness, which is one of Home Video’s other major themes. Dacus now identifies as queer, but Home Video explores Dacus’ teenage confusion about this part of herself, the blurred lines of girlhood friendships.
Songs like “VBS” and “Christine” hint at queerness (You're falling asleep / On my shoulder in the back of your boyfriend's car / We're coming home / From a sermon saying how bent and evil we are), but “Triple Dog Dare” is what Disney might call “an exclusively gay moment.”
Your mama read my palm
She wouldn't tell me what it was she saw
But after that, you weren't allowed to spend the night
I'm staring at my hands
Red, ruddy skin, I don't understand
How did they betray me? What did I do?
I never touched you how I wanted to
I am on record as believing that most songs don’t deserve to be longer than four minutes, but clocking in at seven minutes and forty-three seconds, this magnum opus of sapphic longing is the gorgeous album-ender that solidified Home Video’s spot in my favorite albums of the year. It starts soft and sweet with Dacus’ clear, unaffected vocals, builds steadily towards the bridge which culminates in an echoing crescendo of harmonies, and then falls off to a lovely, haunting outro. If “Hot & Heavy” opens the album with a certainty about the past and its place in the present, “Triple Dog Dare” ends it on the note we don’t want to admit to asking ourselves when we’re certain and grown: what if?