max's thoughts

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been piecing together my family’s history of mental illness. I do feel comfort in having an explanation for my depressive orientation, but mostly I feel some kind of dread. It’s like a fortune teller has slapped me across the face with a prophecy of doom and gloom. I know what’s over the horizon, and I feel pretty helpless to change anything since it all comes down to a chemical imbalance anyways. However, I haven’t really given myself a chance either. 

In 2022, my top Spotify artist was Mitski: again in 2023, and Phoebe Bridgers in 2024 (top 0.001% not to brag). And I love those artists, I really do. I love the artistry in their albums—I love these songs! But, I’m also proud of myself for leaving their music behind. I cannot be happy when I surround myself with misery, and letting go has been hard but so, so necessary. All that to say: Lucy Dacus is my top artist of 2025 and I couldn’t be more pleased. 

For the longest time, I was pretty pessimistic in how I saw artistry. I thought true depth and meaning came from suffering. In the context of albums, nothing compared to the most soul-crushing works: Laurel Hell, Puberty 2, Stranger in the Alps. But Lucy changed my mind.

Forever Is A Feeling was an exploration of love, and by far the most compelling, artistic album of 2025 in a way I haven’t heard before. With the context of her and Julien’s relationship you can just feel the meaning in every song. Everything is so specific, but the universality of the situation keeps it relatable. There is not a single skip on this entire album because it is an artistic masterpiece that explores every facet of queer love with such tenderness: the yearning and the angst of unreciprocated love—the warmth when it is reciprocated—and the backdrop of what you lost by not acting sooner. 

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Firstly, I love the opening track, “Calliope Prelude.” I am a huge fan of instrumental interludes in albums because they tie the whole thing together as an artistic exploration. Phoebe Bridgers does this perfectly in Stranger in the Alps with “Smoke Signals (Reprise)” as an interlude of the first track, and then opening Punisher with “DVD Menu.” Adrianne Lenker released “mostly chimes” and “music for indigo” a day before songs. I eat it up every time because they convey the meaning of an album without lyrics. I get to really appreciate the intentionality of the instruments and sounds.

What gets me next, though, is how intentional the tracklist is chronologizing their relationship. The next three songs all explore yearning so beautifully, and how it evolves. “Big Deal” states the impossibility of it all, but ends with repetition: that Julien matters. “Ankles” takes that impossibility and instead opens with “What if…” as it indulges the idea. Then you hear “Limerence” which turns the love-struck yearning on its head. You’re forced to remember what makes it all so tortuous.

A note on “Limerence.” One of my favorite things to do with music is listen while reading a related book. I read Swimming In The Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski while looping this track and would highly recommend the experience! The novel is a second-person POV of a gay man in 1980s communist Poland writing to his lover. The intimacy is just unparalleled, and works so beautifully with the backdrop of Forever Is A Feeling. 

To be honest, I’m a bit thrown off by the next track. I love “Modigliani” don’t get me wrong. With the album being about Julien, though, the song dedicated to Phoebe feels misplaced in the storyline. I would honestly prefer “Losing”, which was later released in Forever Is a Feeling: The Archives, replace it, with “Modigliani” included in the archives. As it is, the song is sandwiched between two very angsty tracks: “Limerence” and “Talk.” It would especially help because the latter is very sonically different from the rest of the album—which I appreciate. It feels like the darkest hour of the album.

“For Keeps” then explores the in-between nature of everything. Outright, Lucy sings, “We were not something, We were not nothing.” After that, we arrive at the title track “Forever Is a Feeling”, which is the title track for a reason. Here, the tone of the album completely changes from that unrequited yearning to reciprocal love: which continues throughout the entire second half. The song is beautiful. I so appreciate the repetition. Remember when I mentioned “Big Deal” ending with that repetition? Well, so does “Forever is a Feeling.” Both songs repeat their title exactly eight times, it’s such an amazing parallel!

Afterwards, the next four tracks are so, so lyrically striking and love-filled. Here are my favorite lines from each one:

Come Out: “I’ll hike up a hill where they say there’s a view | ‘Cause the sky around five might remind me of you.”

Best Guess: “You were looking for saints, but you only found people | Ain’t that just the way it goes?”

Bullseye: “Found some of your stuff at my new house | Packed it on accident when I was movin’ out | Probably wrong to think of them as your gifts to me | More like victims of my sentimentality”

Most Wanted Man: “I still believe in God sometimes, it always takes me by surprise | To catch myself in the middle of praying | But I thank god for you and I don’t know what else to do”

Then, finally, you have “Lost Time” and where do I even start. This song healed whatever “Night Shift” broke in me. “Lost Time (extended)” off the bonus tracks is the most beautiful, tear-jerking, touching, love confession I have ever heard. The specifics of her love for Julien make the song so meaningful, and yet it’s still so universal to every queer love story. It really is so moving, and the crescendo of “‘Cause I love you”? Pure cinema. 

Then, in the bonus tracks, you have the twin tracks: “Bus Back to Richmond” and “More Than Friends”. Both are such amazing works that expand on the complex in-between relationship we first see in “For Keeps.” I love that they were released as a single in early August, ahead of Forever Is A Feeling: The Archives in October. Letting the album grow and expand organically over time, in the way Lucy did, just aids that artistry so much. You saw these tracks being played in concerts, and then gradually got them to yourself as the project grew on tour. So beautiful, wow. 

Then, her cover of “Time In a Bottle” really ties together the overarching time motif—specifically, the impossibility of eternity. The lyric “But there never seems to be enough time | To do the things you want to do once you find them” shares the same idea presented in “Lost Time”: “Nothing lasts forever but lets see how far we get | So when it comes my turn to lose you, I’ll have made the most of it.” Both want to spend forever with their lover, but there’s never enough time—wasted time of the past and the eventual end of the future.

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Shoutout to Breanna & co. for such an amazing concert experience, this was the best concert to be my first & I will #neverforget. I also want more music recommendations like this album! Throughout these winter months, I don’t want to contribute to some self-fulfilling depression prophecy. A genetic predisposition doesn’t mean all hope is lost, and giving up—seeking comfort in the same sad music—certainly won’t help.