“Let’s go missing,” Phoebe Bridgers declares on Lost Weekend. That’s exactly what she did, more or less, immediately after ascending to a new level of stardom in 2023 with boygenius, her indie-rock supergroup, alongside Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. At the 2024 Grammys, where Bridgers won more awards than any other artist, she described her upcoming plans on the red carpet: “Now, we walk into the sunset,” she said.
She’s back now with her first solo album in six years, and there’s a lot of catching up to do. Bridgers makes up for the last several years (you might call it lost time) by giving us her longest and most daring record yet, a tour de force in the art of disappearing, falling in love, and feeling grief so deeply that waking up every day kind of sucks. But as she proves across 16 tracks, it’s not all that bleak — and she makes sure to sprinkle her charm and sharp-witted humor across the record. “I was the belle of the governor’s ball,” she sings on the whimsical highlight “The Governor’s Waltz,” one of several songs full of cryptic hints about what her life is like these days. “Hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall.”
All work and no play makes Bridgers a dull boy, so she finds time to experiment sonically, like on the opener, “The Outside.” She enters on vocoder — bolstered by synths from her new collaborator, Jack Antonoff — as she delivers lines that possibly nod to her massive year with her boygenius buds, and what she was going through while it happened: “Crying in a suit and tie/But you should see the other guy/One more time for old time’s sake/I’ll watch him get carried away.”
Bridgers said she’s been listening to a lot of ambient music lately, and you can hear how that shaped Lost Weekend, along with Radiohead (fans were quick to point out the Kid A shirt she wore at one of her recent pop-up shows). These influences are eerily present on glitchy interludes and instrumentals, like on the meditative centerpiece “Panorama,” where she doesn’t sing for the first two minutes, letting the sparkling piano, string arrangement, horns, and synths take the lead. The new touches enhance her favorite lyrical motifs (sleeping, chemicals, hospitals all make an appearance here) and joyous screams, like on standout “As Above,” which she debuted earlier this summer at Madison Square Garden. “You won’t have to believe in magic,” she triumphantly yells. “Leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen.”
When Bridgers released her 2020 breakthrough, Punisher, she said one of its themes was numbness. But on Lost Weekend, she feels it all, encountering every spectrum of emotion. “I have no secrets, only feelings,” she admits on the country-tinged beauty “Haunted” (fans of “Graceland Too,” this one is for you). The loss of her father, who died in 2023 at 60, looms large, examined on heartbreaking tracks like “Still Standing” (“I can’t imagine you dead/But you are every day”) and “Lost Weekend (Reprise)”: “I am my old man’s oldest son/I fought the wall, and the wall won.” She even includes a voicemail from him on “Never Going Back!” that makes the grief even more gutting.
But as lonely as she might have felt — this is an album with four song titles containing the word “lost” — she wasn’t alone. Happiness flows through the track list, too, particularly on the subject of her largely off-the-radar relationship with comedian Bo Burnham. She falls hard for him on “Bobby,” an uptempo rocker that basks in dizzying euphoria: “Now I don’t know if I can make it tonight/ But what are you doing the rest of my life?” And on gems like “Liberty Tree,” she contends with being a rock star — the same songwriter who once romanticized shower beers and payment plans now has “too much money, and nothing to lose.”
Another signature Bridgers move: She loves a good bookend. In the same way that “Smoke Signals” began and ended her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps; “DVD Menu” was snuck into the coda of “I Know the End” on Punisher; and the boygenius EP fan favorite “Me & My Dog” got a sequel with “Letter to an Old Poet” on The Record, “Lost Weekend” comes full circle for the reprise at the close. It contains one of her most stunning couplets yet: “Now I can’t see any stars in the sky/When a dream comes true, a fantasy dies,” reminding us why she’s one of the most compelling songwriters in music today.
Lost Weekend arrives just as Bridgers turns 32. We see her grappling with aging on “Kill Me” (“Turning 21/I’m not, but I was once”) and “I Can’t Wait” (“Not so slowly getting older/California sober”), one of the collection’s most dazzling moments. That song features a special guest, credited under the pseudonym Son John-Johnson, who sure sounds a lot like Geese’s Cameron Winter — another indie singer-songwriter who often seems ambivalent about being put under the microscope of fame. The two duet here, trading lines as Bridgers offers a real glimpse at how she sees herself these days, whole for the very first time: “All my life/Side by side/Hyde Jekyll Hyde/Finally together.” It’s great to have her back.
