Historian by Lucy Dacus

Historian, Lucy Dacus's second album, arrived on Matador on March 2, 2018, and the Richmond, Virginia songwriter made it with the same crew behind her debut No Burden: she co-produced with Jacob Blizard and Collin Pastore, and she and her band knocked it out in a single week in Nashville in March 2017. She has called it a song cycle about getting through loss and life's darker stretches with hope, even joy, and it plays exactly like that.

The title comes from her urge to document and hold on to the people and moments she treasures, knowing none of them will stay. Death and hope circle each other across the record, and the arrangements, which drew comparisons to Wilco in their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot days, swell from hushed to thunderous. "Night Shift", the first single, is the knockout, a slow burn that finally erupts, with "Addictions" following it out in January 2018. Critics hailed the album.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.