No Burden: Lucy Dacus's first takes, ten years on

Nine songs, one day in a Nashville studio, a band that had barely learned them, and a singer who would not have called herself a musician. That is No Burden, Lucy Dacus's debut, out in February 2016 and now ten years old. The tenth-anniversary reissue comes with new art, her masters back in her name, and one unreleased song added to the end. It still plays less like a debut than a document.

Dacus came out of Mechanicsville, a suburb of Richmond, Virginia. She left a film degree at VCU rather than carry the debt, and worked at Richmond Camera editing children's school photos while she wrote. Around thirty songs came out of that stretch; nine made this record. "I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" was the first thing anyone heard, a single in November 2015, and the album followed on EggHunt, a Richmond label, before Matador picked it up and re-released it that September. Historian arrived in 2018, Home Video in 2021, Forever Is a Feeling in 2025, and in the middle of that sits boygenius with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers and three Grammys in 2024.

She recorded No Burden in Nashville with two friends from home, Collin Pastore and Jacob Blizard, at Blizard's request and as a school project. A Kickstarter cleared its goal two weeks early. The band got one day, plus a couple of hours the next morning for "Trust" and a few guitar overdubs. In her note on the reissue she remembers lyrics on sticky notes and napkins, shifts as a box office attendant and a yearbook photo editor and a terrible waitress, a melody hummed home on the walk, the guitar part figured out before sleep. "I didn't think any of you would hear them," she writes. "Maybe 50 of you?"

The sound is guitar first, and that guitar is downpicked and hard-struck, closer in attack to the Strokes than to the singer-songwriter records it gets shelved with. The band plays in the room with her, which is what happens when everyone learned the songs that morning. Her voice is more southern here than it is now, and untrained in a way you can hear: she was not used to a mic, not used to headphones, and most of it went down live, sometimes in one take. There is blues in the chords, and the phrasing leans jazzy, closer to pop than to the talk-singing that gets pinned on young songwriters with guitars. Underneath, the lyrics keep to one subject, the little boxes people get sorted into and then defend.

"I Don't Wanna Be Funny Anymore" opens by turning down the role in its title, and the rest of the record follows that refusal. "Strange Torpedo" was the other single. "Trust" is the song they came back for, the only one here given a second morning and a few guitar overdubs, and the extra time shows in how firmly it stands. "Map On A Wall" runs 7:28, the one place an idea is allowed to go past the shape of a first take. Nothing else on the record runs long. Then there is the punctuation, which the reissue changes: side A closes on "Dream State..." and the album used to close on "...Familiar Place", two thoughts trailing off, and "No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye" now lands after the last of them, so the whole thing ends on a sentence instead of a thought left hanging.

The record is for anyone who tracked Dacus through Historian or boygenius and wants the same eye with a thinner, louder frame around it, and for anyone who keeps the first records of writers they love, the ones where the voice has not settled yet. It sits beside Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen, and it is honest company for Julien Baker's Sprained Ankle, another record of somebody working out how much to say.

The flaw is the clock, and it is structural. A day was enough for the songs, not always for the arrangements, and the record's own best argument against the method is "Trust", which got the extra hours and holds firmer than anything around it. Dacus names the trade herself: "We only had one day to record, and if we had more time, I might've found my footing, for better or possibly worse." The "possibly worse" is the honest half. Some of the unsteadiness is the reason to keep this record. Some of it is only a band running out of time.

The reissue's real argument sits at the end, in "No Thank You, I Love You, Goodbye". Written in the same weeks as the rest, it belongs in the room: same band, same brevity, nothing about it sounding like a draw from the archive. No Burden holds at 4.0. Nine songs, one day, a band that learned the material that morning, a voice she had not found yet, nobody watching. She has her masters back now. Ten years on, it still sounds like the day it was made.

The tracklist

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