Lucy Dacus: Historian [MATADOR]

Why you'll love it

This Matador LP comes with a download card and a custom inner sleeve printed with the lyrics. Historian drew an 82 on Metacritic, a perfect score from the Chicago Tribune and 8.1 from Pitchfork.

This edition

• Download card included
• Lyric inner sleeve

About the album

Some people keep diaries. Lucy Dacus wrote an album and called it Historian, explaining that she had an impulse to document and capture the people she loves precisely because they won't stay. She described it as a song cycle about living through loss and the darkness of life, and doing it hopefully and joyfully.

Dacus produced it with Jacob Blizard and Collin Pastore, the team from her debut No Burden, and the band cut it in about a week in Nashville in March 2017 at Trace Horse Studio. "Night Shift" opens the album at a slow burn and builds to a huge, cathartic finish, "Addictions" swaggers with horns, and "Nonbeliever" and "Yours & Mine" sit somewhere between short story and anthem. Critics heard echoes of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot era in the arrangements, which swell up and fall away around her calm, low voice. "Pillar of Truth," written about her grandmother, and "Historians" close things with real grace.

Within a few years she'd be one third of boygenius with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, and plenty of people found their way back here from there. Bring tissues; we keep a box by the counter for exactly this LP.

Also at Kops: more Lucy Dacus on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Matador (cat# OLE-1139-1), a reissue of the 2018 album.