$20

A Dork five-star record. '$20' arrives as one of three singles that first signalled boygenius's return after a five-year absence, each track written individually to showcase the distinct voices of Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. The song moves through a landscape of small failures and smaller escapes: a motorcycle in the front lawn, a Chevy on cinder blocks, the perpetual scramble to keep things running. There's a deadpan acceptance to the recklessness on offer, a willingness to embrace bad ideas simply because they're there. The repeated refrain about needing twenty dollars becomes something larger than a request for spare change, a kind of shorthand for the gap between what you need and what you have. What distinguishes '$20' is the way the three voices enter and circle the song without ever quite colliding. They don't harmonise so much as acknowledge one another, each singer holding their own space whilst remaining aware of the others. The production stays sparse, letting the lyrical detail breathe: the arsonists in another life, the flowers pushed into the front of a shotgun, the mother's advice that wishes don't run on fuel. It's a song about scraping by that never tips into sentimentality, maintaining instead a kind of wry defiance in the face of circumstance.