Missing out on the biggest concerts of the year always feels bad—especially now that TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram users all thrive on rubbing it in. Didn’t get tickets to any of Harry Styles’ billions of shows at Madison Square Garden? At least you got to watch everyone else who did go stream the entire show every single night. Same goes with everything from Adele’s Vegas residency and those fun-looking Bad Bunny shows last year. The depression shared by those of us sans tickets was almost comically strong.
The 2023 summer concert slate feels especially unmissable. Taylor Swift has already embarked upon her “Eras” tour, which has already launched an entire subculture online. Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour starts this summer, and I still refuse to believe it’s happening, in order to numb the pain. Blink-182’s latest reunion tour was hard to score tickets for; so was, improbably, Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service’s double-headliner anniversary show this fall. And Frank Ocean is headlining this year’s Coachella, which starts this weekend; as a starved fan, that one’s especially painful to miss live.
Add one more artist to fear missing out on this summer: Boygenius. Phoebe Bridgers fans are intense. Lucy Dacus fans are intense. Julien Baker fans are intense. Bring them all together—as the women have done with their so-called “supergroup” Boygenius—and you’ve got one of the most dedicated fanbases in music right now. With the release of the band’s first full-length album earlier this month, we Baby Boys (the name for us I’m trying out; let me know if it sucks) finally have something different to freak out about beyond their 2018 EP.
But if outsiders thought all the chatter around The Record, as it’s conveniently titled, was dramatic, they weren’t ready for what would happen once Boygenius’ long-awaited tour kicked off. On Wednesday night, Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker played Pomona’s Fox Theater, their first real show since November 2018. If you were there, you let everyone know about it. And if you weren’t, well, you let everyone know about that too.
A plethora of videos started popping up during the show itself, which I feel some type of way about, but that’s for another post. People who literally changed their usernames to brag about attending the Pomona show uploaded Twitter clips of Boygenius performing new songs like “$20,” “Cool About It,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” to great fanfare.
Your mileage may vary on the volume of the crowd, which already knows every word to every song. Such is the dedication of a Baby Boy.
Popular cuts off the earlier EP also commanded attention, like the beloved “Me and My Dog.”
People love to hear Bridgers, in particular, start wailing—something she’s proven very good at since releasing “I Know the End” in 2020, objectively the best song off her album Punisher.
But it’s the moments in-between songs that have engendered the most jealousy. The Boygenius trio is known for their close-knit friendship, which partly inspired them to launch the group in the first place. To see Julien Baker smiling with her friends on stage? Beauty in motion. That group hug they apparently did at the end of the show? We could cry!
Obviously I was not at the Pomona show last night, or else I’d be coming down from my euphoric night instead of writing this post. No, I was eating chocolate eggs on the couch and watching Beef. I was not alone—well, I was when I was eating chocolate eggs on the couch and watching Beef. But there were plenty of other Boygenius fans perusing social media last night, bemoaning the fact that we were not also at the show.
The good news is that this was only the first stop on the tour, which Boygenius has dubbed “The Tour.” The bad news is that the next stops are at Coachella, which normal people cannot afford to attend. The worse news is that several other shows around the country have already sold out. But at least we’ll always have tons of people live-tweeting every moment that we wish we could be seeing in-person ourselves.
Keep obsessing! Sign up for the Daily Beast’s Obsessed newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
