Phoebe BridgersPhoebe Bridgers has carved her name into music royalty, her lyricism capturing the fullest spectrum of human capacity, often eliciting a poignancy inherent to humanhood but inaccessible in modernity.
Her solo albums Strangers in the Alps (2017) and Punisher (2020) garnered a global audience for their authenticity, both emitting a fluidity equal parts delicate and unimaginably grand.
And now she is back with her latest Lost Weekend, a staggering 16-track album that, in its length and its uniqueness, is bound to connect with audiences everywhere. It’s the latter that makes this record an incredible addition to her discography.
It’s taken losing a parent, falling in love and emerging out of the COVID-19 pandemic to result in the ultimate release of this new one, but the consistently abrupt and unpredictable endings to each song, alongside the sudden upheaval of sound mid-song, make this album her most explosively experimental yet.
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The opening track, The Outside, stirs into Bridgers’ lyric “Crying in a suit and tie /, but you should see the other guy / One more time for old time’s sake / I’ll watch him get carried away.”
These opening couplets are sung through a vocoder that rumbles, as if a futuristic hymn were washing out over a speaker system in a public place. The digital ethereality moulds itself into a delicate piano section and Bridgers’ signature angelic voice.
The whole song gives off a sonic response that speaks to the title – that is, as if one were placed aerially above the song, on the outside, looking into it objectively and as emotionally reactive as needed.
There is a constant return to this sound throughout the album, one that is portrayed in Panorama. This track evokes the breadth of what can be seen in panoramic view, a wholeness omnipresent throughout Lost Weekend.
As the journeying piano from the opening track fades into a high-pitched ambient drone that bleeds into Lost Boys, where more vocoder and distortion commence, the track breaks into a jangly guitar picking pattern, overlaid with Bridgers’ lyrics “Lost boys/Never grow up, never go home/Lost boys/Never spend their lunch money, yeah.”
The ‘Yeah’ is a vehicle for total joy and glee, indirectly implying that audiences somehow find themselves lost, however that manifests.
There are hints of synth and brass that add to the joyous luminosity of the song. An arrangement that turns dramatically into a delicate bridge, only to build in a boundless, dynamic crescendo that fades out as layers are gradually removed to leave behind Bridgers’ echoing ‘yeah’.
This joy and wonderment return in Liberty Tree, but it’s a reverb-guitar arpeggio that opens for Kill Me, as a sturdy choral progression on acoustic guitar overlays the initial moodiness. What sounds like an organ, as well as a violin, add an almost haunting element to the track that blushes “Times are scary/My boys are getting married/Turning twenty one/I’m not, but I was once/Certain, always/Now all I know is the ending.”
Sonically, there’s a distancing that occurs in this, as if a yearning, or grieving, impacts a finite connection with what is taking place in the song.
There’s little wonder the album has assumed the form it has, Bridgers’ having admitted that “The music I’ve listened to the most for pleasure is probably ambient music, but I don’t even think I realised how much interstitial stuff there was on the album until it was done. What I love about ambient music is that, when you’re listening, you can’t help but feel whatever it is that it’s trying to make you feel.
“The method of emotional transfer from composer to listener is totally different than it is when relying on a lyric to tell you something or inform you of something.”
And there is an objective, as well as subjective truth in this as Kill Me ends like you finally found yourself in the eye of a storm, only to have The Governor’s Waltz resemble a choral or evangelical backdrop, whilst the delicacy of Bridgers’ voice takes the light.
And then the sonic fullness of Bobby breaks the glass ceiling. The character is mentioned in Kill Me, but the detailed grandeur of this song captivates the attention in a stadium arrangement kind of way, only to fizzle out into a reverb-rich keyboard section that combines with the sound of a TV advertisement.
The title track welcomes an ecclesiastical sonic expression, as a tonally effected keyboard holds Bridgers’ rhyming couplets “Back when no one could tell us apart/And I’d turn down the music to parallel park/We were playing for no one on top of the world/I talk in my sleep, and you kiss like a girl.”
As Lost Weekend dances through heartbreak, deceit, and figuring out how best to show up in a relationship, the lyrics subside, letting the keys open into a delayed ambient feedback loop, complemented by the sound of breath, that eventually cuts open into tiers of strings.
Haunted returns as a clustering folk tune that draws forth a strings section and a suite of instruments that evoke a sense of adventuring, whether literal or emotional, and into another realm.
The track features only five lines of lyrics, as Still Standing breaks out, examining a memory of her father, who passed away in 2022. The album's midpoint speaks to all the themes interwoven throughout the record: relief, regret, sorrow, rage, and more.
In its microcosmic expression, it encapsulates the staggering affect strewn throughout its entirety, illuminating Bridgers’ storytelling prowess in a whole new light. The track fades out with a humming and a keys arrangement that again reflects the overarching ecclesiastical sound.
The refrain of Never Going Back is initially sung into a vocoder, only to expand into a foot-tapping guitar section that simply doesn’t last long enough. It’s over in 1:43 minutes, but ought to be sung along to, an anthemic reminder to continue to prosper on, moving forward. It closes with a voicemail left from her father, complicating the emotionality expressed in Still Standing.
Other Plans shifts the energy into a reflective and sorrowful one, in which Bridgers’ lyricism reads: “I remember the day I created the world/I got blood on my favourite shirt/You were shaking like a final girl/I got what I deserved.”
Lines that drip in specificity, holding the capacity to resonate with anyone experiencing remorse or regret, as she finishes the song with “Our love/Our love had other plans for us/Our love, honey/Our love/Our love had other plans.”
It’s in the spaciousness of the sound in Lost Parade that the emotional weight of the album is truly felt, a moment to reflect and feel, void of lyrics.
I Can’t Wait reveals the potency of love, as Bridgers dances with the experience of facing separation from a lover. “You can change your mind/But you can’t change mine/Hyde Jekyll Hyde/You and I forever”. It’s a stirring departure from the overwhelm of grief, but one that recognises the relationship each has with one another.
This track boasts a moment of simplicity in its instrumental arrangement, stripped back to feature a harmonica and guitar section that includes a duet – a timely inclusion given the themes being explored.
There’s a cinematic quality to As Above that establishes an in-depth enquiry into the phenomenon of memory and its wondrous, mystical capacity. The accompanying bass-synth and guitar work that extends long after the lyrics conclude signifies the rounding out of the album, a closing credits of sorts.
And then it's Lost Weekend (Reprise) that bookends the album. A return to hymnal elements threaded through the entirety of the LP. It’s the lyrics of “I am my old man’s oldest son/I fought the wall, and the wall won” that echo the vastness of losing a parent.
As “But we’re gonna be alright/Me and you/You love me, and I won’t ever let you forget/Not yet” exist as the closing lines, the song finishes with the microphone being switched off or dropped.
The punctuation of this moment simultaneously renders another listen-through of the album the only possible outcome, as well as going for a long walk to move through the emergence of whatever response was drawn forth from it.
Either way, this is a masterpiece from Bridgers’, one that will etch her into one of the most real, talented and varied musicians in contemporary music – a modality that is diffused, when Bridgers’ Lost Weekend is otherwise unwaveringly intimate.
You can listen to Lost Weekend wherever you get your music, and today you should do just that.
