Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend review – long-awaited return is a thrilling, daring study in dislocation
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- Lost Weekend is Phoebe Bridgers' first solo album in six years, following 2020's Punisher, which made the UK Top 10 and sold 500,000 copies in the US
- The intervening period saw Boygenius (with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker) win three Grammys for The Record, and Bridgers earn another win for her SZA collaboration Ghost in the Machine at the 2024 Grammys, plus guest appearances on Taylor Swift's Red, Lorde's Solar Power and Paul McCartney's McCartney III Imagined
- The album is dedicated "For Dad" and confronts the death of her father and the collapse of her engagement to actor Paul Mescal, with the title track confirming she called it off ("I'm supposed to be married but I called it off")
- The Governor's Waltz contains a lyric widely read as a swipe at Mescal's current partner Gracie Abrams ("she can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed, on that stage")
- Lost Weekend's sound blends Americana-infused indie singer-songwriter elements — acoustic guitars, mandolins, melancholy violin — with heavy sound-design experimentation including drones, feedback, eerie wordless vocals and sudden plunges into silence, credited to collaborators Jack Antonoff, Jon Brion, Alex G, Conor Oberst and her Boygenius bandmates
- Still Standing explores the disquiet of feeling indifferent at a parent's death, and the album closes with "I am my old man's oldest son / I fought the wall and the wall won"
Why it matters: After six years away from solo work and a stretch that turned her from a critics' favorite into a Grammy-winning mainstream collaborator, Bridgers uses Lost Weekend to push her sound in a markedly more experimental direction — burying familiar indie-folk textures under drones and feedback while processing grief and a broken engagement.
