A lost weekend is time you can't account for: you come out of it changed, unsure quite how. Phoebe Bridgers, it seems, has been living inside one. Six years after Punisher, she returns not with interviews but phone-free pop-up shows for $20, and an album that drifts further out than anything she's done before: sixteen songs about losing her father, ending a relationship and falling headlong in love.
"The Outside" opens muffled and distorted, Bridgers' delicate voice melting through the static as she watches someone "get carried away", frozen in place but not afraid. It is an introduction to an album that keeps its footing deliberately uncertain: contemplative, self-empathetic and insightful, with a melody that occasionally wobbles off-key like life refusing to stay on an even keel. Her father, Tony, died in December 2022, and his ghost drifts across the record. "Still Standing" is its stickiest, most haunting moment, a childhood scene rendered in the most gut-churning terms: "I found her bleeding over the sink, but when you said sorry, you were looking at me." By “Never Going Back!” I am fully undone: the tinny guitar and stripped little refrain – “the way it used to be is not the way that it is” (that I shall take as my motto, thank you please) – give way to a voice note from her dad: “Being a rock star takes up a lot of your time, I guess… Give me a call when you get a chance.”
But Lost Weekend is not a misery memoir. Running alongside the mourning are two other things: letting go of an old love, and a new romance vast enough for an endless sunset. The first “Lost Weekend” speaks winsomely of looking back at a previous relationship, its gentle whisper set against surging strings. The lyric: “I’m supposed to be married but I called it off / I’ve been known to throw a tantrum when things are not the way I imagine…” then drives to a rollicking finale with a strong pulse, shiny flourishes and a strong exhale, the sound of someone singing their way out of the wreckage. "I Can't Wait" is synth-drenched and shimmers like sunset on glass, a warm duet with the mysterious male voice.
And then – get thee to the mosh pit for "Bobby" – a song that flings its arms open to the sunshine, all floaty ecstasy and hopeful lyrics like "this could be the ending I wanted"; "Liberty Tree" is banjo-twanging Americana with the heart-in-mouth plea "don't die, Bobby, before I die"; "Lost Boys", the fist-in-the-air lead single, is a moreish road-trip singalong winner. That two such enormous feelings, bottomless grief and dizzy joy, can share one weekend is where this album finds a perfect kind of equilibrium. Sadness and joy can sit side by side – each making the other feel more keenly itself. C’est la vie. "The Governor's Waltz" lays gorgeous, haunted picking and a fluttering Spanish tremolo beneath choral swells and the wry ache of "two kids in a trenchcoat living alone… I was too happy to feel at home".
A record that mourns and adores in equal measure, Lost Weekend shows Bridgers at her most fearless, letting songs build, resolve, or abruptly just stop, where you least expect. By the end, on the que-sera calm of "As Above" – with its contemplative micro-detail storytelling – she sounds strangely settled, and so, somehow, am I. In the closing "Lost Weekend (Reprise)" the song plays like a Super 8 movie scene glimpsed in a rear-view mirror: "If I ever come out of hiding," she sings, "you won't have to know how to find me again." She calls it a lost weekend. But the thing she came back with will have a place for you to find yourself in.
