Album of the week: Phoebe Bridgers – 'Lost Weekend'
Phoebe Bridgers' much-anticipated third LP is 'an expansive, 16-track wonder', finds Craig McLean
Masterpiece incoming… Six long – but very much not idle – years after her second album, the accidentally Covid-timely Punisher, the singer-songwriter from Pasadena, California releases her third. And it’s an expansive, 16-track wonder, its treasures gloriously trailed by lead single ‘Lost Boys’.
With trumpets and strings and a melody to die for, here be a shimmering blast of baroque-pop in the vein of Sufjan Stevens, the sound rounded out by contributions from a studio crew including Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus (her bandmates in power-trio side-hustle Boygenius), plus Alex G, Jack Antonoff and Nate Walcott from Bright Eyes. Its childlike wonder was driven brilliantly home by Bridgers’ debut TV performance of the song: appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, she was backed by a band made up of rockin’ out kids. Their glee was only matched by hers.
If the full bloom of the artistry of Bridgers – 32 next week – is on display in that lead track, the lead-in was equally vivid. She toured for two years solo, and put in a shift opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras run. Boygenius won three Grammys for their 2023 debut the record. And, on a night of a thousand stars, Bridgers was the most honoured artist, winning a fourth for ‘Ghost in the Machine’. Around and about all that were guest spots on songs from Muna, Bright Eyes, Lorde, Andrew Bird, The National, Arlo Parks and Paul McCartney.
All of which creative tributaries lead to Lost Weekend, an album of dislocation (wrought by success) and dissolution (of relationships) which opens with, in ‘The Outside’, the image of Bridgers having an out-of-body experience while, it seems, crowd-surfing.
‘Kill Me’ is as forceful as the title, a deep, plunging drone-rock power-lament that has, buried in the jagged walls of guitars and electronics and vocals, the mysterious “Son-John Johnson”, aka, most likely, Geese’s Cameron Winter. His distinctively reedy voice pops up, again uncredited, duetting on ‘I Can’t Wait’, an unabashed epic of orchestral indie-rock.
‘Bobby’, with mandolin, pounding drums and crashing guitars, evokes R.E.M. around the time of their grunge-era masterpiece Monster. ‘Haunted’ is vivid Americana, all violins, mandolins and acoustic guitar, with a powerhouse vocal and a melody that’s giving folk-song standard.
Bridgers the poet of the everyday drops pearls on the hymnal, organ-led (“I turned down the music to parallel park”), her hushed vocals sitting snug in the listener’s cochlear. Then the song explodes, just past the halfway mark, into a chiaroscuro of glitches, panting, trumpet blasts and skittering synths – one of the best realisations of the vibrant sonic palette of this record.
Bridgers the cineaste and budding actor (she’s in upcoming crime thriller Primetime with Robert Pattinson) makes her lyrical presence felt on lines such as “you were shaking like a Final Girl”, a horror trope-referencing lyric on the spacious, staring-at-the-ceiling piano ballad ‘Other Plans’ – a lament for a relationship that took an unexpected turn (“our love, honey, had other plans for us”).
That love of the screen is there, too, in “hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duval”, a reference to The Shining that vividly sets the scene on the ghostly, opalescent ‘The Governor’s Waltz’. Some are interpreting it as a post-mortem on Bridgers’ relationship with Paul Mescal and on the actor’s new girlfriend, Gracie Abrams, the allegedly telling lines being “and she can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed on that stage / I have not lost any sleep”. This less-than-chronically-online reviewer is less convinced.
The wrenching emotion, though, forever runs deep and rich, and is never more potent when she references the father with whom she had a complicated relationship (and whose death she announced in early in 2023). ‘Still Standing’ is hollow-eyed confessional of grief and numbness and unresolved feelings, unabashed in its presentation of complex memories about her parents (who divorced in her teens): “I found her bleeding over the sink / but when you said sorry you were looking at me”. Then, on the close of ‘Never Going Back!’, we hear a sweet voicemail: “Hey Phoebe, it’s your dad. I know you’re busy. Being a rock star takes up a lot of your time I imagine!”
Given what that commitment has produced here, we should all be grateful.
