Lucy Dacus: Forever is a Feeling (digital outlets)

When bands break up it's interesting to observe which members go on to the most success: in 1970 would anyone have put their money on George Harrison over McCartney and Lennon?

The Stones never actually broke up but when Mick Jagger released solo albums he realised very quickly that his best pathway to more success lay in mending the rift with Keith and getting the band back together.

Obviously singers have the best chance of success (although long memories will bring up the how many chart hits the Mindbenders had and how few their former lead singer Wayne Fontana enjoyed) because they've been mostly in the spotlight.

Can anyone name the other members of Simply Red?.

The Grammy-winning band boygenius were never quite what we might consider a longterm commitment for Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker . . . so to learn they are on a hiatus of indeterminate length only means they can all resume their successful solo careers.

And new albums by each member have arrived almost simultaneously.

We start with the first to arrive: here the inventive Lucy Dacus again steps out under her own name for tasteful, thoughtful and sometimes provocative alt.rock which comes with strings attached, and assistance from singer-songwriters Hozier and Blake Mills as well as her boygenius pals.

After a brief introduction from treble-forward strings we're swept into the shuffling folk and lyrical intensity of Big Deal where she sounds convincingly worn down by the end of a relationship (“everything comes up to the surface in the end, even the things we've not even spoken . . . ), the more assertive and sensual heat of Ankles (“pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed . . . I'm not going to stop you this time”) and the melody of the swooning piano ballad Limerence -- which brings to mind kd laing -- sounds transported from a romantic film of the 1940s (“I'm thinking about breaking your heart someday soon”).

From throbbing drone pop (the sonically claustrophobic guitar noise on Talk) through the narrative about a lover-musician on Bullseye with Hozier as the other party (“wish I could come to the show but I understand, can't just walk in like any other fan”) to the quiet melancholy that being separated from your lover can bring on Lost Time, Dacus covers not just intense matters of the heart but couches her songs in such diverse settings that this is like an almanac of emotional seasons gathered over time.

This understated album – and the new Julien Baker country album with Torres – confirms there's still plenty of adult, thought-provoking material from that boygenius source.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here

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