A tuning radio. The shouts and muffled beats of a New Year’s Eve party. A voicemail from her father. On her excellent third studio album, “Lost Weekend,” Phoebe Bridgers creates a collage of the years since we last heard from her as a solo artist.
It’s her first solo album since 2020’s beloved “Punisher” and the return of her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, Boygenius. Those intervening years, Bridgers explains in press materials, were also full of personal changes and challenges. One relationship dissolved and another blossomed. And in 2022, her father died. The album is dedicated to him.
Those are the dominant experiences Bridgers examines across the record, which sees her pair her signature lyrical style with enthralling, complex sonic arrangements. The journey she brings listeners on is not linear, but feels instead like a sort of road trip. Some experiences are lingered within; others merely drift past. Bridgers visits a mall on “Liberty Tree,” as a relationship sparks. A van breaks down in the title track, just before she acknowledges the breakup of a proposed marriage. On “Panorama,” ambient beats pulse and mix with a guitar track for over a minute before the listener arrives at Bridgers’ verse, and a hotel room. It’s a resting place, giving listeners space to absorb some of the more intense lyrical revelations surrounding the track.
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In classic Bridgers fashion, the images evoked send listeners lurching from euphoria to heart-wrenching melancholy.
Screams undercut the opening of “Bobby,” about how the intensity of a love can be felt in the mundane details of a shared life. Banjo played by co-producer Jack Antonoff peeks out from below the heavier drum and guitar track — a wistful, carefree, sonic thread. “Bobby, this could be the end of wanting,” she sings, as the instruments soften. When the track resurges, that refrain is repeated: “This could be the end.” Endings remain a Bridgers motif, but the hope imbued in this one makes it feel like an antidote to her apocalypse-anthem “I Know The End.”
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“Still Standing” sees Bridgers reflect on a different kind of ending. Acoustic guitar builds as she recalls moments from her childhood, and considers her relationship with her late father: “I wasn’t too young to understand / I just didn’t think it was so bad,” she sings. “And it wasn’t in a way / And now there is nothing.”
Across the project, the intentionality displayed is stark. Space is not wasted. “Never Going Back!” is lyrically simple, for example, but complicated by that voicemail. Throughout, those collected clips are grounding — like intercepted signals from reality, breaking into the soundscape Bridgers has crafted to help herself (and us listeners) understand it.
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In early June, Bridgers played a selection of hits and songs from the album at Madison Square Garden, the cap on a series of pop-up concerts. Phones were strictly prohibited. Even pencils were banned. The limited distractions didn’t silence the gasps and cries of reaction, but the lack of electronics allowed for more careful listening. Those shows were a signal for how this album should be absorbed: carefully, deliberately. And the experience was meant to be fleeting — just like feelings.
On the beautiful “Haunted,” Bridgers gets on the road again. “I have no secrets, only feelings,” she sings. “And I know those go away.”
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“Lost Weekend” by Phoebe Bridgers
Four stars out of five.
On repeat: “Bobby,” “Still Standing,” “I Can’t Wait”
Skip it: “Lost Parade”
For fans of: Road trips without a destination, old home videos, ambient music
