Earlier this week, boygenius – the women-led supergroup composed of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – premiered The Film, a Kristen Stewart-directed short featuring three individual music videos from the band’s highly-anticipated full-length album, The Record, and their first release since their 2018 EP. For individuals who’ve been maintaining with boygenius’ queer antics for some time now, Stewart’s honourary addition to the family won’t come as a surprise: the band is built around female friendship, with Pulitzer-nominated novelist Elif Batuman writing the introductory essay to the album, while Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams cameoed the trio’s Rolling Stone cover shoot.

Suitably, boygenius also likes to poke fun at male hero worship: their band name is a wink-eyed reference to how male artists are sometimes propelled into god territory, over-inflated and sold to the general public as visionaries (the artwork for his or her self-titled EP took a similarly playful approach, imitating Crosby, Stills, & Nash’s debut). The inverse is touched on their track “Strong Enough”, where they described female musicians as “all the time an angel, never a god”, while heading in the right direction “Leonard Cohen”, the songwriter is savagely dismissed as “an old man having an existential crisis in a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry”. 

But most significantly, the fantastic thing about boygenius is the bond between its members, all of whom discover as queer, and whose music – the type that’s historically been made by misogynistic bros – explores the nuances of female friendship in all its emotional intensity. This connection is crystalised in certainly one of the album’s closing tracks “We’re in Love”, as Dacus croons: “We stripped all the way down to our skin/ Cold and porcelain/ Like bathers in a painting.” Already completed individual performers in their very own rights, it’s the strong bond between all three members that makes listening to boygenius such an intimate and joyful experience.

Elsewhere, Turkish psych-rock outfit Altin Gün share a recent release, Tyler, the Creator drops an expanded edition of Call Me If You Get Lost, and Tzusing unveils his sophomore album.