Sorcha Murray
Stepping into the public eye for the first time since a whirlwind two-year run with Boygenius, ending with their 2024 Grammy win for The Record, Dacus is kicking off her fourth studio album release with some artful yearning.
‘Ankles,’ produced by Lucy Dacus and Blake Mills, opens with a longing Dacus. In the song, Dacus is singing “What if we don’t touch?/What if we only talk/About what we want and cannot have?” over building violins by Phoenix Rousiamanis.
Throughout ‘Ankles’, Dacus cherishes the current moment.
The New Track
Wrestling the baggage with the beauty and asking “How lucky are we to have so much to lose?”. Confronting fears of fleeting time and a need for immediacy in her art, the ‘Night Shift’ writer told Dazed, “I think with this whole record, I wrote songs as things were happening. A lot of the time, it’s taken years before I can write about something, but this is the first time I felt like I needed to write about my current emotions, for my own well-being, to express to myself what’s going on.
Forever Is a Feeling seems to be a patchwork quilt of an album, worked on by a laundry list of exciting musicians.
Dacus also described how “‘Ankles’ is all about wanting something you can’t have, particularly someone you can’t have, and trying to figure out how to let off that steam so that it doesn’t explode and blow up your life.”
The New Music Video
This yearning of wanting someone you cannot have is particularly evident in the single’s accompanying music video. The video stars Dacus, dawned in her best dress and actress Havana Liu.
Dacus plays a runaway muse while Liu plays a security guard chasing her down. We follow the two in a cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of Paris. The video ends with everything in it’s right place–to the dismay of the longing security guard.
The security guard resigns to only this daydreaming about the muse–keeping their true desires hidden so as to not “blow up [their] life”, as Dacus put it.
The whole video, directed by M. Amberson is very similar to A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) as some eagle-eyed fans have pointed out.
The Upcoming Album
Forever Is a Feeling seems to be a patchwork quilt of an album, worked on by a laundry list of exciting musicians.
Some notable features are contributions from Bartees Strange who joined Boygenius for Re:SET festival back in 2023. The release is also set to feature contributions from Hozier, Madison Cunningham and Phoebe Bridgers.
Not daring to hang up the custom made Rodarte gown, Dacus dawned it once more for a performance on The Tonight show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Darcus’ album Forever Is a Feeling will be out March 28th.
READ NEXT:
- FIRST LOOK — BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY TRAILER
- QUINCY JONES: LOOKING BACK ON A LIFE OF MUSIC
- CELESTE RELEASES EVOCATIVE NEW SINGLE ‘EVERYDAY’
Featured image courtesy of Will Francis on Unsplash. No changes were made to this image. Image licence found here.
