Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus recreate Nirvana's iconic Rolling Stone cover for their comeback as boygenius

• Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus are on the cover of Rolling Stone's February issue.
• The trio, known as boygenius, recreated Nirvana's iconic cover from 1994.
• Boygenius will release their official studio debut, "The Record," on March 31.

Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus are marking the return of boygenius by paying homage to their punk-rock forebears.

The beloved indie trio is on the cover of Rolling Stone's February issue, wearing suits and staring down the camera in the same way that Nirvana did in 1994.

The boygenius cover, photographed by Ryan Pfluger, casts Bridgers in the center as frontman Kurt Cobain, Baker as drummer Dave Grohl, and Dacus as bassist Krist Novoselic.

"Recreating the Nirvana cover we thought was cool," Dacus said in a behind-the-scenes video. "We thought it was funny."

"I like how there's sort of a raw element to everything that they made, and I feel like we definitely try to maintain a level of imperfection," she continued. "They also seem like — I don't know this — but they seem like people who were confused by the hype about them. And like, we're our own biggest fans, but also, I can relate to that." 

She added: "Also, Julien looks like Dave Grohl."

According to Baker, the cover shoot was a combination of "shitposting" and dream fulfillment.

"You saw somebody do something and you were like, 'Wow, I wanna do that. I wanna be that rockstar guy,'" she said. "And then by some random miracle, we get to do it."

In the cover story, the musicians reflect on the expectations they face as an all-female supergroup — to be "remarkable," to be feminist, to be symbolic of social change — whereas all-male bands are rarely measured by the same standards.

Indeed, the band name is itself designed to poke fun at unearned male worship.

"Something that's been really important to us is to be able to exist like any other band: to make a sick song and have that not be weighted because of all these extraneous identifiers that we work within," Baker said. "It would be more effective for a kid to look at photos of the live set or at the album credits and to understand this world is accessible to them than trying to make an explicit statement about [the band having] only queer folks."

Bridgers, Baker, and Dacus met in 2016 and formed boygenius two years later. Their self-titled EP came together somewhat spontaneously and was hailed by critics upon its release. (For the cover art, they struck the same poses that Crosby, Stills & Nash did for their own debut album.)

"We set out to make one song, and made six," Bridgers told Rolling Stone. "It was not like falling in love. It was falling in love."

While each woman is a solo artist and acclaimed songwriter in her own right, fans have been clamoring for more collaborative music ever since.

Five years later, boygenius will release their official studio debut, titled "The Record," on March 31.

"There's a realm in which I feel permitted to be ambitious in this band, in a way that I can't for my own solo stuff, because it's something shared with people that I love who are the greatest songwriters ever," Baker said. "I feel an uncomplicated pride about it."