With the release of her much-anticipated second album Historian heading our way on Friday 2 March,Lucy Dacus gives us another taste of what’s to come with her new single ‘Next Of Kin.’ It’s an album stand-out that highlights Lucy’s silky alto, crisp production, and intimate storytelling. “I am at peace with my death / I can go back to bed” she belts, grappling with the ever-conflicting forces of confidence and insecurity — “I will never be complete / I’ll never know anything.”
Purchase/Stream here: Next of Kin
“‘Next Of Kin’ is the thesis statement of the album,” says Lucy. “It’s a breaking point after a build up of difficult subject matter. It’s a song about accepting fate, forgetting fear, and allowing yourself to be incomplete always.”
“This is the album I needed to make,” says Dacus, who views Historian as her definitive statement as a songwriter and musician. “Everything after this is a bonus.” And it is indeed a remarkably assured 10-track album that finds her unafraid to take on the big questions — the life-or-death reckonings, and the ones that just feel that way. It’s a record full of bracing realisations, tearful declarations and moments of hard-won peace, expressed in lyrics that feel destined for countless yearbook quotes and first tattoos.
Dacus and her band recorded the album in Nashville last March, re-teaming with No Burden producer Collin Pastore, and mixed it a few months later with A-list studio wizard John Congleton. The sound they created, with substantial input from multi-instrumentalist and live guitarist Jacob Blizard, is far richer and fuller than the debut — an outward flowering of dynamic, living, breathing rock and roll. Dacus’ remarkable sense of melody and composition are the driving force throughout, giving Historian the immersive feel of an album made by an artist in full command of her powers, on a new level of truth-telling and melodic grace.
The past year, with its electoral disasters and other assorted heartbreaks, has been a rough one for many of us, Dacus included. She found solace in crafting a thoughtful narrative arc for Historian, writing a concept album about cautious optimism in the face of adversity, with thematic links between songs that reveal themselves on repeat listens — touching on everything from political unrest to creative burnout to the death of her grandmother. “It starts out dark and ends hopeful, but it gets darker in between; it goes to the deepest, darkest, place and then breaks,” she explains. “What I’m trying to say throughout the album is that hope survives, even in the face of the worst stuff.”
Lucy Dacus
Historian track list
1. Night Shift
2. Addictions
3. The Shell
4. Nonbeliever
5. Yours & Mine
6. Body To Flame
7. Timefighter
8. Next Of Kin
9. Pillar Of Truth
10. Historians
Lucy Dacus – Historian is out Friday 2nd March via Matador Records / Remote Control Records.
