For years, Phoebe Bridgers has been on an odyssey to the moon. She yearned for a spaceship to hold her away from a strained relationship on Boygenius’ 2018 self-titled EP; the trio’s full-length debut ends with Bridgers gazing on the full moon as she pulls away from her tormentor. On “Voyager,” the third tune on Boygenius’ new EP, The Relaxation, Bridgers has lastly landed. “Strolling alone within the metropolis/Makes me really feel like a person on the moon,” she sings, taking inventory of the journey. Her bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus are there together with her, swaddling every lyric, cushioning every step, with hummed concord. These are mates—those you inform your tales to, time and again, who stick round for each revision and new installment.

Friendship, famously, is Boygenius’ raison d’être and a key a part of its worth proposition. Kindred spirits who first met whereas making the rounds with their respective solo initiatives, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus had been finally booked on a joint tour, precipitating their first EP collectively. Virtually instantly, their union amassed extramusical significance. Initially, it felt like want success for these desperate to go off girls enjoying rock as a newsworthy occasion; finally, it settled into an prolonged counterpoint to heteropatriarchal concepts about female friendship and cooperation, and to the notion of genius as an attribute of erratic (male) individualists. (When a distinguished modern embodiment of that concept lately used Boygenius because the setup for an inexpensive joke, Dacus minced no phrases.)

Over the pandemic, searching for companionship and a inventive outlet, the band acquired again collectively to put in writing and report a correct debut—The File, launched this March. Six months later, they’re following it with The Relaxation, a four-song companion EP aglow with the sense of triumph that has haloed the group’s current historical past. Boygenius are about as huge as a rock band might be in 2023: They’ve landed an album in Billboard’s High 10, obtained second-line billing at Coachella (“I’ve by no means performed a competition when the solar was down,” Baker quipped), and, earlier this month, offered out Madison Sq. Backyard. Their exhibits incite rapture; all three girls are queer, a transparent subtext and surtext of their performances, which has solidified their tour’s popularity as a welcoming house for sapphic expression.