Phoebe Bridgers has released a new video for ‘I Can’t Wait’, arriving alongside her long-awaited third album Lost Weekend, out now via Dead Oceans.
Directed by Chris Maggio and Pablo Rochat, the clip takes a decidedly odd tour through a day in Los Angeles, viewing the city through a distorted, bug-eyed lens. It is the second video to emerge from Lost Weekend and another extension of the visual world Bridgers has built around the record.
The album itself arrives six years after Punisher, the 2020 record that turned Bridgers from an already acclaimed songwriter into one of the defining voices of her generation. Where her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps introduced a writer with a knack for finding humour, dread and tenderness occupying the same few lines, Punisher pushed those instincts into something bigger without sanding away their intimacy.
Lost Weekend comes with considerably more expectation attached to it. Bridgers is no longer the emerging songwriter people are pleasantly surprised to discover. She’s had Grammy nominations, arenas, boygenius and the sort of cultural visibility that can make following up a beloved record a fairly unenviable task.
Rather than treating its arrival like a conventional album campaign, Bridgers previewed Lost Weekend in planetariums around the world. Full-album listening sessions were accompanied either by a custom dome presentation created by night-sky photographer Babak Tafreshi or an immersive laser show from Laser Fantasy. For an artist whose songs can make staring at the ceiling feel like a legitimate evening activity, taking them into a planetarium makes a certain amount of sense.
‘I Can’t Wait’s’ Los Angeles video isn’t interested in presenting the city as immaculate sunshine and palm trees. Instead, Maggio and Rochat make the everyday look slightly ridiculous and vaguely unreal, finding something peculiar hiding underneath the familiar.
After six years without a solo album, Bridgers doesn’t need to prove that Punisher wasn’t a fluke. Lost Weekend has a more interesting job: finding out what happens when one of her generation’s most closely watched songwriters finally gets to make the follow-up.
