Phoebe Bridgers is a motorbike-riding elf queen in the music video of “Lost Boys”, the single from her new album Lost Weekend. As Xbox-meets-Agincourt unfolds behind her, Bridgers sings matter-of-factly, smiling shyly at the camera, flowing medieval robes not quite covering her chunky white trainers. She zaps the sky with light and giggles as her bullish beaus in chainmail turn on each other. This is classic Bridgers: weird mixes of imagery, coy restraint, and then a predictable explosion into emotion.
The rest of Lost Weekend, the California singer-songwriter’s third studio album, is no different. Intertwining a moving reflection on her late father with the jittery, tantrum-like plummet into love after heartbreak, Bridgers whisks two distinct personas into the work.
In the opening track, “The Outside”, one of these personas floats outside her body, watching the other. The first, twisted by a vocoder, sings dispassionately, “I dive into the crowd,” before it melts away into the second, a naked voice, drawling, “I am on the outside, watching/ I am on the outside, watching.” This fragmentation reaches a height in “I Can’t Wait”, a track featuring Bridgers’ former Better Oblivion Community Center bandmate, Conor Oberst, on the harmonica, one of many artist collaborations throughout the album. Here, her dry humour rears its head again as Bridgers goes “dancing with [her] understudy”, contemplating how they are “side by side/ Hyde Jekyll Hyde/ finally together.”
The most likely hit of all the tracks is “Bobby”, the rock banger about Bridgers’ boyfriend Bo Burnham, the songwriting comedian who co-wrote parts of the album. Amid the songs reflecting on her previous partner, actor Paul Mescal, “Bobby”, is emphatic, electric and cheerfully adolescent – although, luckily for her fans, Bridgers doesn’t forsake her characteristic bursting screams between verses or chirpy references to murder in this exultant love song.
Lyrically, Lost Weekend doesn’t quite have the wealth of imagery of her previous albums, Stranger in the Alps and Punisher. At times, the meaning of Bridgers’ lyrics feels impenetrable, and Bridgers’ trademark volatility can be faintly nauseating, like riding a fairground ride you can’t be sure isn’t breaking down. Whispers turn to shrieks; lyrics are exhausted half-way through tracks, leaving heavy breathing into the microphone to take the place of words. It works for a bit and then edges just a little too far from sense.
Bridgers has always been an artist obsessed by endings, with a strong preference for the apocalyptic kind (notably in “I Know the End”, the closing song on Punisher). On Saturday Night Live in 2021 she finished her performance by smashing up her guitar on a stage monitor. Lost Weekend, though, ends with a kind of calm. The final song, “Lost Weekend (Reprise)”, closes with the sense that one day everything will be alright, despite the curse of dreams coming true and the blankness of a starless sky.
[Further reading: Is Kim Gordon still a Kool Thing?]
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