Lucy Dacus @ Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 30 Jun

The Usher Hall couldn’t be a more perfect setting for a Lucy Dacus show – it’s opulent without being imposing, it’s big enough to let her shine but intimate enough to let the music feel the way it sounds – intimate, confessional, close to home. Even more than usual, it suits this tour, for Dacus’s fourth album Forever is a Feeling, a gorgeous set of songs largely about the giddy, floating feeling of falling in love.

After opener jasmine.4.t (who gives us a rollicking set complete with anti-JK Rowling football chants), Lucy Dacus’s band come on with torches, illuminating the instruments covered in shrouds, as though we’ve wandered into a museum at midnight and are going to do some lovely trespassing. The covers are thrown off and Dacus strolls on stage to a frankly deafening cacophony of screams. Behind her are gilded frames, matching the Forever is a Feeling album cover, which at different intervals throughout her set light up with bits of art – line drawings of the band themselves, Picasso-esque odd shapes and lines, a beautiful smattering of clouds at sunset.

Opening track Hot & Heavy is a fun way to get us into proceedings and the crowd are up for it from the off. In fact, the crowd are remarkably well behaved throughout the whole show – there are barely any phones out and they know when to be quiet and listen as Dacus gets to the softer songs in her repertoire.

There’s a run of songs from the new album – Ankles, Modigliani, Limerence – which shine live, Dacus’s vocals somehow even better live than on record, imbuing these new songs with a lived-in warmth that makes them feel like she’s been playing them for years.

After fan request Triple Dog Dare, Dacus launches into Forever is a Feeling's Big Deal, a song that barely hides the fact it is a paean to boygenius bandmate and now-partner, Julien Baker. It’s easy to tell what a joy it is for Dacus to get to perform songs like this and it’s a feeling that continues on Best Guess, which she introduces by not just asking who at the show is gay (a question greeted with a near unanimous cheer, god bless the three boyfriends who linger in the crowd), but also by encouraging us all to be proud to be lovers.

A chaise longue is lifted onto the stage and the band huddle up to perform the next few – For Keeps, Partner in Crime (written in the green room of the Voodoo Rooms no less!), and another fan request, Cartwheel.

Lost Time is paused for a fan to get some assistance in the crowd – all handled swiftly by the Usher Hall team and Dacus – before we get to the encore, comprised of boygenius fave True Blue, an insanely fun cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark and finished, of course, by Night Shift, Dacus’s magnum opus. You can almost see the twinkle in her eye as she sings, 'In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers'. It seems like for Dacus, they finally do.