It's been six years since Phoebe Bridgers released Punisher, the album that cemented her status as the most revered singer-songwriter of the selfie generation, and three since boygenius, the hugely popular best friends club she formed with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, released its triple-Grammy-winning album The Record. In that time, the once social media-loving Bridgers retreated from the public eye, reeling from the effects of fame, a complicated love life and the sudden death of her father. Friday she releases her third solo album, Lost Weekend; it's her account of that time, partly to satisfy her audience, but mostly, its unusual shape and complicated tone suggests, for herself. Ambitious and enigmatic, highly collaborative but insistently personal, Lost Weekend asks a powerful question: How do you tell a story that includes so many contradictory elements, conflicting perspectives, shadowy corners and hidden passageways, it changes shape every time you touch it?
It isn't a simple process. Over the 16 tracks that make up this capacious album, Bridgers starts and starts again: in the middle, at the end and at the beginning. Though Lost Weekend rewards an immersive listen, it's a nonlinear experience, like looking through a scrapbook whose contents keep disintegrating. "I remember the day I created the world," she murmurs at the beginning of "Other Plans," a pivotal track that comes near the record's end and points toward a tentative happy ending. "I got blood on my favorite shirt." This is quintessential Bridgers, the unkempt magic of the everyday. A skilled confessionalist who thinks big while resisting pretense, here Bridgers combines a soaring metaphor with a self-deprecating zinger, suggesting that even a god might have shaky knife skills — or, since this song is actually about sex, might not notice it's that time of the month.
In the past, Bridgers would have set this striking image within a pristine arrangement that let her words glow. But on Lost Weekend, the music does something different. Its subtle design plays into the mythopoeticism of the song's first line without damaging the vulnerability of the second. Bridgers sings in a quavering monotone, answered by what sounds like an array of echoes: a muted piano, a chime in the distance, a phantom low-frequency hum. Suiting a song that equates a first sexual encounter with the primordial singularity, the sound of "Other Plans" seems to form beyond or even before the existence of time. But the main event described in this spare song isn't as important as the first words Bridgers utters, I remember. The music's vibrational hush carries the listener into that space where memories form, the real origin point of the world as anyone knows it.
The critic Hanif Abdurraqib once said that grief is an emotion that knocks on the door of memory, expressing gratitude for the chance it gives to encounter lost loves. Something similar could be said about new love — it knocks on the door of the future, which we can only really imagine within the context of the past. Banging on both doors at once in these songs, Bridgers discovers that behind them are more doors, and a hall of mirrors, and a staircase going nowhere, and a window with wavy glass that makes everything seem upside down. Her wit remains sharp, but she's lost a little faith in the verity of the clearly told story. Using musical techniques and technologies partly informed by ambient music, on Lost Weekend she complicates things: a fragment of a song here, a strong tonal shift there, a surging chorus of guitars to show how feelings distort reality as much as they define it.
Bridgers has always been skilled at the impressionistic style of songwriting that allows a story to unfold via vivid, interconnected scenes rather than through a strong linear narrative. She's known for getting to the heart of a conflict and especially for nailing others' bad behavior: the two phone calls from her absent father in "Kyoto" crystallize her experience of abandonment, the deaths of a baby and a bird evoke romantic despair in "Moon Song."
The daring yet natural-feeling expansion of her sonic palette on Lost Weekend both enhances her lyrical close-ups and shows the ways in which they're not entirely trustworthy. This new approach feels like a challenge to those who would simply call her a truth teller. Songs with spooky titles like "Haunted" and "As Above" ping with references to disorientation and unexplainable transformation: time travel and jet lag, lucid dreaming, magic and make-believe, the Lost Boys of Neverland and, upon first mention of her life-changing new man in a song called "Kill Me," a mystery corpse that haunted an Australian beach for 70 years. "Let's go missing," an ominous chorus chants. Is this a love song? Yes and no.
For Bridgers, the quest for a more effective way to talk about the past — whether about painful childhood memories or the sparks that flew just a few years ago — is a high-stakes investigation demanding a major musical shift. The stellar reviews rolling in for Lost Weekend express giddy approval of its "chattering euphoria," produced through elaborate sound design that incorporates rock fuzz, folkish effusions of banjo and guitar, string arrangements, intricate vocal layering (more than half a dozen pals contribute backing vocals, and others are sampled), spaced-out synths and the vintage vocoder employed by Bridgers and various collaborators.
The album's guest list is massive, reading like an A-list afterparty at Silver Lake's Zebulon: producer credits swell beyond Bridgers' usual crew to include inevitable Jack Antonoff and clever choice Alex G, while the studio gang is truly post-genre, including classical composer Caroline Shaw (who did some vocal arrangements), Blake Mills, American Football guitarist Mike Kinsella, bluegrassers Nickel Creek and pedal steel eminence Greg Leisz. The beau for whom she recreated the world, music-making comedian Bo Burnham, is a major presence, with seven co-writing credits alongside many others. (Known for distorting his vocals on his own records, he may be the one who led her to that vocoder.) Maybe the most amazing feat Bridgers accomplishes is maintaining a sense of confidential disclosure throughout the album, considering this massive crowd.
She does so by expanding and enhancing the settings for her disclosures, pulling at her memories like Silly Putty and seeing what sticks. While songs like the lovestruck "Bobby" and the angsty "As Above" read like vintage unfiltered Bridgers on the page, their arrangements, tilting into feral rock on the former and Lynchian spookiness on the latter, caution the listener to notice that this is an act as well as a confession. Fragmentary set pieces act as scene-setters for the more conventional tracks, and the vocoder that's getting so much attention sets the tone. In the album's prologue, "The Outside," Bridgers uses it to help paint a tragicomic image of herself "crying in a suit and tie" at what seems like her father's funeral, then cracking the kind of joke family members privately make to diffuse the day's tension — "but you should see the other guy." The vocal distortion gives way after a few lines, but it's done its work, signaling that the teller of these truths is in a state of upheaval, not quite herself. This sonic demand to shift expectations recalls another album made in the wake of a parent's death, Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak; the maximalist genre blending and ambient elements that follow invokes Sufjan Stevens, who set the current bar within indie music for turning painful disclosures into cosmic invocations.
Like Stevens (and unlike West), Bridgers has a goal that complements her quest to be more rigorous in her memory practices: the desire for privacy. The lost weekend that names this project was the period during which Bridgers tried to step away from the social-media and red carpet demands inundating her as an increasingly popular musician who also tends to partner with other rising stars. Ink has already been spilled about which lyrics describe her fading affair with actor Paul Mescal, whom she apparently almost married before taking her friendship with Burnham to a different level. About that subject, and about her father's abusive behavior toward her mother in decades past, she gives the gossip mill what it wants.
But she never does it quite straight — a thought of her mother driving herself to the hospital flickers in her mind for a moment, giving way to a wish to sit with her lover on Coney Island's famous Wonder Wheel. A song that appears to be about her dad might also be about her ex, or her own hangups. Virtually every scene Bridgers paints on Lost Weekend has a rogue element — a sudden time shift, an awkward exclamation, a sound that bends and morphs, an image that jars or confuses. Famously meticulous as a writer, Bridgers is deliberately challenging her fans and herself to question her narratives — not to hide behind obfuscations but to comprehend that every well-wrought scene does some violence to the past it tries to capture.
In the end, she's left with her thoughts, her losses and her new attachments. She mourns her father by accepting his utter absence: "He's not coming back as a bird," she sings. Or as a memory she can trust. She turns to her Bobby, looking forward. But even in Lost Weekend's final hopeful moment — set to the sound of a church organ, no less — Bridgers can't deny the instability of what will come, and of what each of them will remember. "You love me, and I won't ever let you forget," she croons in a cracked voice. "Not yet."
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