Album Review: Phoebe Bridgers, Lost Weekend

Phoebe Bridgers has come a long way since releasing Stranger in the Alps, a melancholic indie-folk breakthrough that positioned the singer-songwriter as a patron saint of "sad girl" music.

Her sophomore follow-up Punisher, which she dropped during lockdown, became a monolithic and era-defining album for the COVID years.

In the years following, Bridgers has tried to maintain a lower profile, dedicating her time to collaborations, especially with boygenius, her band alongside Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. Despite her attempts to sidestep fame, the headlines kept coming. She was supposedly engaged to actor Paul Mescal, and then they parted ways; in 2022, her father, the subject of some of her harshest tracks, died.

It's here - on her highly anticipated third album Lost Weekend - that we find Bridgers sifting through and reflecting on the major changes in her life. Lost Weekend takes a more personal tack than her previous output, exploring the complicated grief of losing her father, to whom the album is dedicated. There's a lot of musing on love, too: with blunt mentions of her past relationship with Mescal, as well as the haven of her newfound love with Bo Burnham, who features heavily throughout the album as a collaborator and muse.

'The Outside' invites us into Lost Weekend, a distorted and frothy cosmos that balances darkness and light. From the first note, the opener fizzes around Bridgers' vocals - which shift between vocoder-laced croons and soothsaying warbles - as she places us at her father's funeral: "One more time for old time's sake / I watch him get carried away." As Lost Weekend unfolds, the haunted acoustics of 'Kill Me' and 'The Governor's Waltz' maintain the album's darkened emotional fluster.

'Still Standing' is one of the record's most powerful moments, in which Bridgers recounts a memory that seems to reference domestic violence: "I found her bleeding over the sink / But when you said sorry, you were looking at me." Her feelings towards her father are left unresolved as she muses, "Sometimes I want you back / But not today." Listening to it feels like watching Bridgers pull metres of ribbon out of her own mouth for nearly four minutes. If you're alone and scarred by loss, there's a decent chance that it'll make you cry.

But as there is a crack in everything. Bridgers makes a point of letting the light in. On the album standout 'Bobby', we hear the singer at her most frank in a heartwarming address to Burnham: "This could be the end of wanting." It's a punch-drunk anthem that will surely join the "Canon of Great Love Songs" and slot neatly among the best of them.

It's the duality of darkness and light that makes Lost Weekend so good. The album offers up one last highlight before bidding goodbye with 'Lost Weekend (Reprise)', a laundry list of lessons learned from her troubled father. The track dually welcomes the all-encompassing, newfound love in her life, singing "We're gonna be alright...You love me, and I won't ever let you forget." In the face of the great beyond, she hedges, if only a little bit: "Not yet."