One of the coronavirus pandemic’s many terrible legacies is the slow smothering of ambition in popular culture. In the depths of the crisis, media—music, movies, and all the rest—were widely hailed as a “balm” for anxieties and a “lifeline” to the shared society we could look forward to someday returning to. Yet at the same time, that pre-pandemic sense of cohesion was being destabilized. Entertainers emerged from lockdown to find their fans wild-eyed with obsession and everyone else utterly unreachable. The ensuing years in the arts have felt strange and stilted—defined by stalled dreams, a shattered common stage, and a nervous relationship between artists and audiences.
The Southern California folk singer Phoebe Bridgers is one artist who experienced the unique intensity of a pandemic breakthrough. In June of 2020, her hushed and biting second album, Punisher, was received with the sort of acclaim suggesting the arrival of the next great American songwriter. She was funny and thoughtful on social media, and fans came to regard her with all the intimacy of a best friend—despite her requests for them to step back and respect boundaries. Now, after more than half a decade, she’s released her third full-length album, Lost Weekend—a beautiful but frustrating document of post-pandemic disappointment.
From her early days drawing buzz as a teenage disciple of pillow-voiced balladeers such as John Lennon and Elliott Smith, Bridgers’s appeal has lain in her ambivalence. She is an adventurer with a reclusive streak; she wants to see the world outside of her phone and then get back to bed. Many of her songs play like travelogues through a corrupted civilization—its skies littered with chemtrails and satellites, its bars patrolled by users and abusers. Her sighing style of singing and the downward lilt of her melodies suggest that the world’s fallen nature simply tires her out. “There’s no place like my room,” she sings on Punisher’s closing track, “I Know the End.”
In the years after that album, Bridgers didn’t actually disappear. She collaborated with the likes of Paul McCartney, SZA, and Taylor Swift, who proclaimed “she is the reference now” for modern songwriters. She released a splashy album with the supergroup boygenius. But none of this work had the sheer density of insight—the line-after-line sense of surprise—that has defined Bridgers’s solo music. (Her 2017 single “Motion Sickness” begins “I hate you for what you did / And I miss you like a little kid / I faked it every time, but that’s alright.”) Earlier this year, she embarked on a tour at which audience members were banned from using their phones—a sign that she was coming back to her main project on her own, self-protective terms.
On paper, Lost Weekend is everything that the follow-up to a breakthrough should be: epic-scale, richly orchestrated, musically evolutionary. A glittering cast of collaborators includes the hitmaking producer Jack Antonoff, the Pulitzer-winning composer Caroline Shaw, the indie multi-instrumentalist Alex G, the mandolin-wielding MacArthur fellow Chris Thile, and—suspectedly, under a pseudonym—the It Boy vocalist of 2020s rock, Geese’s Cameron Winter. They’ve created a moody, varied soundscape featuring drum machines, hard guitars, and oases of country plucking.
The first three songs are stunning. “The Outside” opens with Bridgers alternating between Laurie Anderson–style vocoder confessions and swirling piano paired with clean vocals. As she moves from the inorganic to the organic and back again, she also slips between tempos for an effect as mesmerizing as a shadow flickering in a stream. Then comes “Lost Boys,” a should-be smash single in which layers of chiming instruments coalesce into one swinging, shaggy mass. On “Kill Me,” rustling guitars convey cold unease until the chorus offers a hint of warmth. “This is gonna kill me,” sings Bridgers. Then she pauses to add, offbeat, “wait.”
These early tracks portray Bridgers at the height of her success—crowd-surfing at concerts and surrounded by friends—yet feeling alienated. “I pretended it was make believe,” goes a great line from “Lost Boys,” capturing the psychological trickery that results from disassociating from one’s own life. When “Kill Me” crescendos in gang-sung cries of “Let’s go missing,” it’s an exciting cliff-hanger: Bridgers sounds poised to take the listener down a rabbit hole to somewhere fantastical and fresh.
Instead, reality persists, murky and enervating. “The Governor’s Waltz” finds her at a famous music festival, feeling—yet again—disconnected and on edge. Fingerpicked guitars and toybox melodies are creepy yet obvious, like a Tim Burton movie. The lyrics bait gossip blogs by seeming to refer to an ex and the girl he replaced her with. These blind items should be interesting: Bridgers once knew how to make inside jokes land for everyone. But many of her descriptions, across the album, are naggingly opaque or inert. “You had a nosebleed, you were in my way / And you didn’t remind me of anything,” she sings, a line that’s intriguing only because it hints at her own creative blockage.
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For much of the rest of the album, she seems to want to let her musicians do the talking. A number of songs are structurally fragmentary, featuring sudden cuts into silence or lengthy digressions into “folktronica” (a term for banjos-and-beats music of the sort that was last trendy in the 2000s). These seemingly avant-garde touches unfortunately scan more like boho-café fare. In May, Bridgers was seen wearing a T-shirt for Kid A—the numbed-out, synth-driven curveball that Radiohead released in 2000 after achieving alternative-rock dominance. But Bridgers isn’t leading a cutting-edge band that’s built up internal chemistry over years for unpredictable results. She’s enlisted a prestigious mishmash of stars to whip up variations on two moods: looming dread and wistful uplift.
The story she’s telling should have been strong enough to land without so much filigree. On “Still Standing,” she seems to refer to abuse of her mother by her father, who died in late 2022. Rather than just condemning him, Bridgers spends part of the album examining the traits he passed on to her, for good and ill. At the same time, she’s wrestling with a fatalistic view of fame. “Surviving my gift until I get shot,” she sings on the title track—a chilling line on an album with a Lennon-inspired name. Her personal demons and public pressures really do sound suffocating. Can she possibly escape them?
The twist of Lost Weekend is that it suggests a happy answer to that question. On the roaring and catchy “Bobby,” she sings about a blissful home life with a lover, who also shows up as a savior figure in other songs. Their meet-cute seems to be described in the first line: “I saw you slow dancing alone in your room.” Bobby is almost certainly her real boyfriend, the comedian Bo Burnham, and she’s implying that she fell for him while watching his acclaimed 2021 Netflix special, Bo Burnham: Inside, a document of stir-crazed social isolation.
It’s quite the revelation: Back in the pandemic, Bridgers was in the exact same position as her audience—stuck at home and having her life changed by something on a screen. Burnham, himself an object of overwhelming public fascination, has mostly stayed out of the spotlight since Inside, though he has seven writing credits on this album. Virtual desire becoming real, isolation giving way to communion, a life built outside the digital panopticon—these are powerful themes for the 2020s. But too often, the album meets its moment in a sad way: with strained, distant songwriting that suggests its creator’s hesitation about reconnecting with the crowd.