Six years is a long time to disappear from your own solo career. Phoebe Bridgers returns with Lost Weekend, an album produced with a team including Jack Antonoff, Alex G, Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, but perhaps its most important credit is also its shortest: “FOR DAD”.
Bridgers’ father died in 2023, and grief hangs heavily over Lost Weekend, although it doesn’t immediately reveal itself in obvious ways. The opening track is almost jarring, Bridgers’ voice pushed through vocoder effects while strings move behind it. For an artist whose natural voice and canny lyricism have always been such central parts of her appeal, electronically manipulating that voice is an unexpected and quite intense way to begin.
‘Lost Boys’ retains traces of the vocoder before the Bridgers we know emerges, her unadorned vocal taking over for a bittersweet love story coloured by regret. There may also be an appearance from Geese’s Cameron Winter (Son-John Johnson is credited on vocals,) here, although the identity behind the vocal remains tantalisingly unclear.
‘The Governor’s Waltz’ puts Bridgers’ writing firmly back in the foreground. “Hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall,” she sings, dropping Kubrick’s The Shining into the song before turning towards a former relationship: “And she can pretend to be me / Since she took my place and bed on that stage / I have not lost anything.” Whether every autobiographical breadcrumb leads exactly where listeners suspect is almost beside the point. Bridgers knows precisely how much detail to leave lying around.
‘Bobby’ carries echoes of the work she made alongside Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker in boygenius, while the title track takes its time revealing itself. ‘Lost Weekend’ begins with Bridgers almost alone against an atmospheric synth, looking back at a relationship that never made it to the altar: “I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off.” Then, in its final third, a sweeping guitar arrives and carries the song forward before everything suddenly stops.
Those abrupt endings become something of a recurring presence across the record. Songs don’t always resolve so much as disappear.
That makes the jump into the acoustic ‘Haunted’ particularly effective, especially as the song expands into a full-scale country singalong. ‘Liberty Tree’, meanwhile, finds some light in the gloom, an upbeat portrait of new love that has Bridgers fooling around in a photo booth: “I’m sticking out my tongue / And lifting up my shirt.”
‘I Can’t Wait’ brings Conor Oberst in on harmonica alongside vocals credited to the mysterious Son-John Johnson, whose identity raises the possibility of Cameron Winter appearing once again. But it is ‘Never Going Back’ that delivers the album’s most devastating moment. A voice message from Bridgers’ father: “Being a rock star takes up a lot of your time, I’m guessing.” There’s a Cat’s in the Cradle quality to it, the old parent-child dynamic quietly reversed as Bridgers’ father looks towards a daughter whose life has moved on without him.
That grief spills directly into the closing ‘Lost Weekend (Reprise)’. “He’s not coming back as a bird / He’s not coming back / He’s not coming back,” Bridgers sings, stripping death of comforting metaphors and leaving only its blunt finality. And then, once again, the music ends abruptly.
Perhaps those endings are Bridgers’ way of confronting what her father’s death has taught her: things stop, sometimes without resolution, and there is no final verse waiting to make sense of them. Lost Weekend begins by disguising Bridgers’ voice and ends with her facing an absence that cannot be disguised at all. It is a fine ending to a great album, and six years after her last solo record, Bridgers has returned with plenty to say.
