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Hemby, who has helped write hits for Miranda Lambert, Maren Morris, Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga, had a session with Jarosz as a teenager and collaborated with her again on a new song, the self-questioning “Good at What I Do.”

A certain humility in the face of the field’s uncertainties also seems to help; on a different questionnaire, therapists whose care was more successful gave responses that “reflected self-questioning about professional efficacy in treating clients.”

After finishing his graduate studies in sociology at Cambridge University, England, Adler was in San Francisco founding education technology startups when a 2013 visit to the grave of his homeless uncle precipitated self-questioning over his view of people living on the street as “problems to be solved rather than people to be loved.”

The lyrics, delivered in Sampha’s eerie falsetto and George Riley’s confessional breathiness, offer paradoxes and self-questioning: “I’m changing, moving, losing, higher,” Riley sings.

Even in the quietest, most self-questioning songs on “The Record,” boygenius sounds like its members are egging on one another, cheering the boldest moves and pushing past collaboration toward synergy.