Frank Ockenfels
When the world needed Phoebe Bridgers the most, she vanished.
It’s been six years since she released her breakout hit album Punisher and charmed the world in a skeleton onesie. It’s been three years since boygenius sang about Leonard Cohen, satanists, and lost love. Bridgers's new album, Lost Weekend, out August 14, has a lot of ground to cover including her father’s death and calling off an engagement to Normal People star Paul Mescal. Thankfully, it’s 16 songs and nearly an hour long with far more than fodder for the tabloids. “But if I ever come out of hiding, you won’t have to know how to find me again,” she sings on the record’s finale, “Lost Weekend (Reprise).” Well, she’s back — and with an idiosyncratic, tightly crafted set of revelatory songs.
The cover of 'Lost Weekend.'
“Phoebe Bridgers makes sense: one part @sosadtoday, one part Leonard Cohen,” Mish Barber-Way wrote in Bridgers’s 2018 FADER cover story. Early on, Bridgers was heralded as the return of Laurel Canyon royalty. Like Joni Mitchell, her life, and love life, have been extensively picked apart in the press. She got the money to record her first album after a song of hers was used in a commercial. She parted ways with her band at the time (a coven founded by the legendary Sloppy Jane) and recorded Stranger in the Alps with some help from Dead Oceans and Conor Oberst, another collaborator she dated after breaking up with her drummer Marshall Vore. All of this lore is intrinsic to Phoebe’s mystique: the bandmates, her life in Pasadena, the romantic entanglements. Over time, her image evolved as the internet witnessed her tenacity. She called out Ryan Adams and told plenty of men to rot in hell, including former Recording Academy CEO Neil Portnow. She smashed her guitar on television and told bros to fuck off when they complained about her technique online.
Bridgers’ brand of womanhood has always felt more accessible to me than the manicured style of most pop stars. In 2020, I constantly roamed the streets of Red Hook and the empty aisles of my local CVS while listening to Punisher and her debut Stranger in the Alps. On those albums, Bridgers sings beautifully about Graceland, pelicans circling, and Kyoto arcades, crafting hyperspecific tales of depression and lost love that still reverberate with universal appeal. Her relationship to the internet — posing in Playboy, tweeting as @traitorjoe, her love of Elliot Smith and Erewhon—was curated, sweet, and ironic. She made fans feel better about the nightmarish lullaby of being online. Now, she shuns the spotlight.
Bridgers started dating Bo Burnham and eventually went on a hiatus from public life in early 2024. Privacy became its own currency. No wonder phones weren’t allowed on her recent pop-up tour and she’s not doing interviews around the new album. With four Grammys, multiple side-projects, and numerous collaborations with Lorde, SZA, Taylor Swift, and the 1975, she doesn’t need to prove anything anymore. Maybe once she was afraid of being the fan or punisher at the show, but now she’s afraid of us. We’re the punishers. We have to prove — through proper etiquette — that we can watch the concert respectfully from a safe distance.
Bridgers is back — and with an idiosyncratic, tightly crafted set of revelatory songs.
Lost Weekend was produced by typical Bridgers mainstays like Ethan Gruska and Tony Berg, but she’s also brought on Jack Antonoff and Alex G for additional support. Bo Burnham, along with familiar faces Christian Lee Hutson and Marshall Vore, helped co-write multiple songs. “I Can’t Wait” credits a mysterious Son-John Johnson and based on the falsetto backing vocals it may very possibly be Geese frontman Cameron Winter. Teal overhead light and UFOs adorn the merch for the new record, but the album’s lyrical content is decidedly more mundane than the end of the world drive-by of “I Know the End” or the vampires of “Savior Complex,” though one song does mention Tamam Shud — the case of an unidentified body on the shores of Australia. Instead, Lost Weekend is split between ambiguous eulogies and energetic love songs.
The music video for the exuberant lead single, “Lost Boys,” finds Bridgers as a queen ordering her knights around while donning a blue silk Rodarte gown and elf ears. It’s the slickest song on the record, one of only two that use Vocoder, and it’s somewhat of a fake-out for the rest of the tense, ambiguous songs on Lost Weekend. Much of the rest of the album is far more spare — only occasionally erupting into turbulent trumpets by Nate Walcott. She once again recruited Rob Moose to arrange string accompaniment.
Bridgers’s new songs take their time, preferring ambience to rock and roll, though there are a few raucous love songs like “Bobby” and “Liberty Tree.” It may be her happiest record yet. “We’ve got stars on the ceiling and clothes on the floor/ And a thing in a box I don’t fuck anymore/ Bobby, this could be the end of wanting/ I exist only if you’re watching,” she sings on the former before a short Wurlitzer-like outro. “Panorama,” “Lost Parade,” and “Other Plans” act as palette cleansers, short interludes that interpolate and re-harmonize previous melodies. Many of the songs refuse to resolve themselves with obvious pop structures, instead morphing halfway through as on “I Can’t Wait” or falling apart into cacophony or moving from quiet to loud with sudden force as on the gorgeous, jaw-dropping “Kill Me.” It’s one of the best songs of her career, delicate, sumptuous, and perfectly executed. There’s a complex maturity to these compositions, supported by grounded lyrics and careful instrumentation and production.
It’s a skillful development even as Bridgers still harnesses her folk impulses and cutting lyrics. Under her pen, men shake like “final girls,” and the stage is lit “like candles in a cake.” There are allusions to calling off a wedding on “Lost Weekend” and “Other Plans” riffs on John Lennon (“Surviving my gift until I get shot”), while “Haunted” delivers sing-along country fun. There are a slew of new instant-classic Phoebe-isms: “I loved you, and you couldn’t forgive me for that;” “I have no secrets, only feelings / And I know those go away / There is a difference between lying and deciding what not to say;” “Feeling indifferent, wearing black / Sometimes I want you back / But not today.” There’s a different kind of agency embedded in these songs — Bridgers is actively pursuing desire and refusing to be mistreated.
Perhaps from a distance is the most honest and safe way Bridgers can approach listeners now.
If Punisher was a record for lovesick agoraphobes, Lost Weekend is for those balancing romance and grief. The emotional gravity of this new record is focused on “Still Standing,” the most direct song about Bridgers’s dad’s passing in 2023. “I can’t imagine you’re dead/but you are/everyday,” she nearly whispers on the gut-wrenching track. Bridgers was long vocal about her difficult relationship with her dad and the abuse her mother suffered. On “Kyoto,” he forgets his kid’s birthday. “I feel so much fucking empathy and so much fucking anger toward him,” she told The New Yorker in 2020. After he passed — and fans harassed her at an airport on the way to his funeral — she went dark online.
In the past, Bridgers has said she can’t write about things while they’re happening. Mining personal experience for gold requires space to see things from all sides. What she unearths on this record to say about her father is the result of someone who was able to take space. On “Still Standing,” Bridgers recalls a traumatic childhood scene with her mom and dad: “I found her bleeding over the sink / But when you said sorry, you were looking at me / I can’t remember what I said / But I didn’t mean it.” Later, on “Never Going Back!,” she features a short voicemail from her father where he asks her to call her back.
Bridgers’s ability to weave a heartbreaking narrative through song is unparalleled and Lost Weekend may be some of her best work yet. It’s a thrilling, no-skips record where the full fury of grief and love meet on these perfect songs. The songs that combine these two themes are some of the record’s strongest: On the rolling piano of “As Above,” she tells her lover she has to take him to the Wonder Wheel before they die. “You’re gonna take me for granted / But I can handle it,” she sings movingly before the song’s exorcism finally relinquishes us. The instrumentation is just as layered and thunderous as the words, searching for release.
Lost Weekend is Bridgers offering a message in a bottle, a shimmering missive from her time lost at sea. Perhaps from a distance is the most honest and safe way she can approach listeners now. On her own terms, she penned a stunningly confident and honest album that refuses easy categorization, neither only about grief or love, but their uneasy alliance. Someday she’ll go back out somewhere we can’t find here, but for now she’s out of hiding.
