By Variety | Created at 2026-08-10 02:24:48 | Updated at 2026-08-10 03:51:55
4 hours ago
If there’s anything Phoebe Bridgers knows how to do, it’s land a punch line. There are a lot of them in “Lost Weekend,” her first solo record in six years, and she doesn’t waste any time in getting to the first of the album’s many great jokes. Possibly the most quotable couplet comes right in the opening lines of the opening number, “The Outside,” which has Bridgers wryly and ruefully singing through a vocoder that she is “crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy.” Quickly it becomes apparent the “other guy” is her late father, laid out in his coffin. If that cold open leaves you unsure whether to LOL or brace for tears, welcome to the world of “Lost Weekend,” where a little bit of gallows humor is never far off, and neither are surprising heaps of heart-on-sleeve emotion.
“Lost Weekend” is expressly dedicated to her dad, who continues to comes up for discussion in the album quite a bit. But there is another guy besides “the other guy.” The songs also repeatedly reference a still upstanding character named “Bobby,” whom the listener can clearly understand, from copious clues, to be Bo Burnham, her significant other of a few years. The result of Bridgers reflecting so much on her relationships with these two men is an album that has one foot in the grave and one firmly planted on Lovers’ Lane. Flitting between deadpan sorrow and impassioned romance, Bridgers’ album is alternately spooky, hilarious, mysterious and sneakily moving. Maybe it goes without saying: it’s not to be missed.
Peeking ahead at the credits before putting the album on play might throw you off as to just how intimate “Lost Weekend” will be. Jack Antonoff joins a cast of producers that also includes holdovers Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska and Bridgers herself; as many as 20 players are credited on a single track, many of them (especially busy boy Antonoff) playing multiple instruments within that number. But it’s not as much of a wall of sound as the sheer accounting of personnel would suggest — no broth-spoiling here, in other words — on a record that tends toward the slow, quiet, offbeat and nonlinear. Some of the soundscapes feel like quirky electronic art-rock experiments; others exercise Bridgers’ Americana muscles, like when the trio Nickel Creek shows up en masse on “Haunted.” The sound can feel dense, but never overloaded — and there are certainly no obvious sops to commerciality here. It’s as if she got most of whatever radio-friendliness she might harbor out of her system with the jangliest moments on the Boygenius record, although the anthemic quality of the horn-blasting “Lost Boys” stands as a bit of a “Kyoto” redux in this collection.
Even if the album is personal and idiosyncratic to the point of being something that some might label “uncompromising,” though, it’s still a big ole hit, destined to be greeted with rapture upon the album’s August 14 release and again when she performs this sometimes insular material in sold-out arena settings a few months hence. All that’s needed to keep the cult of Phoebe growing is to leave us hanging on every word, whether the next line is a cosmic gag or an unexpectedly earnest profession of love.
She’s not above some fan-friendly self-referencing, as on “Kill Me,” when she sings, “Now all I know is the ending,” in obvious allusion to the fatalistic climax of her previous album. But now, in the kind of romantic gesture that last album lacked, she comes to an additional conclusion: “Bobby, you taught me that I know nothing.” Later on, there’s a number actually titled “Bobby,” which is a good indicator that this guy will not be going away, on this record… or ever, if she can help it. In that banjo-propelled song, she describes a beau who had to “bend over to get through the door / And if you didn’t like either one of my friends, I’d kill them.” Another good gag, that, although not as punchy as the one where she chirps, “We’ve got stars on the ceiling and clothes on the floor / And a thing in a box I don’t fuck anymore.” But she knows when to quit kidding. “Bobby, this could be the end of wanting,” Bridgers blurts out, in one of the emotional peaks of an album that shows she’s coming out of hiding after her sabbatical in more ways than one.
But maybe you want it darker, as Leonard would say. She can still handle that, too, and anyone worried by the possibility of a Phoebe Bridgers album completely filled with love songs can remember how this one begins with the bookmarking of grief. It’s a complicated kind of mourning she’s doing for her father, as anyone who remembers her singing about him in 2020’s “Punisher” will kprobably now to expect. “Still Standing” is one of the record’s most powerful tracks, with Bridgers singing in a hush over quiet synths on a slow build to an understated choral ending. It’s a chilling memory song that seems to reference domestic violence: “I found her bleeding over the sink / But when you said sorry, you were looking at me.” (Insert your own gulps here, as appropriate.) It’s not a pure broadside; Bridgers shows some empathy when she sings, ” You left your suitcase by the bed / Like you needed to know you could go whenever you wanted.” Post-funeral feelings are unresolved, to say the least: “Sometimes I want you back / But not today,” she sings. And: “I can’t imagine you dead / But you are every day / Thank you for everything.”
And Dad actually makes an uncredited vocal cameo on one of the album’s more blessedly strange tracks. “Never Going Back!” has Bridgers singing a cappella, then over a loud and cranky acoustic guitar, as she nearly chants a handful of vague singalong phrases like “The way it used to be is not the way that it is.” And suddenly Papa Bridgers takes over the second half of this mid-album oddity, with a voice mail he left for Phoebe, sounding like the most genial presence alive (or dead): “I know you’re busy. Being a rock star takes up a lot of your time…” Anyone with unsettled daddy issues — which might be most of us? — may need to take a couple of time-outs over the course of a first or second listening session.
The album is filled with riveting moments like these… not all of them to do with a father or current love interest. Possibly the most talked-about song will be “Governor’s Waltz,” in which Bridgers describes herself apparently having a bad day while playing the Governor’s Ball festival back in 2021, “hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall,” and moving on to wider issues during what fans might describe as the Paul Mescal era. “Let’s see how long we can go without touching,” she sings, eventually changing “touching” to “talking” as the things they have given up for Lent in this relationship. A final verse whose lyrics have leaked is being taken by fans as a slap at Gracie Abrams, saying, “She can pretend to me,” referencing a stage bed prop: “Since she took my place in my bed on that stage / I have not lost any sleep.” She concludes, seemingly speaking to someone who has claimed Bridgers as an influence: “Being myself wasn’t easy — do it for me.” Dear reader, if you have not gasped yet at any of these lyrics, you may do so now. Different fandoms may debate whether the shots fired there are justified, but Bridgers is kind of taking one at herself here, too, amid all the no-love-lost.
She also alludes to known past circumstances in the title track of “Lost Weekend,” in which she confirms what everyone who saw her wearing an engagement ring years ago suspected, as she reveals, “I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off” — adding, presumably to her famous former fiance, “You know me, and I’ll never forgive you for that.” The track ends with a minute-long electro-celestial coda, before ending as abruptly as the relationship in question might have, if we are to take any clues from that.
Bridgers has rarely indulged her country-loving side, outside of some well-chosen covers, but she gets into it in a big way with “Haunted,” which sees her describing the ups and pitfalls of fame: “I’m putting on my makeup while they’re lighting the stage up / Just like candles in a cake / If you’re gonna make a wish then you better be specific / You’re gonna have to live it every day.” Yet this isn’t primarly a complaint about being a celebrity, like some other material we’ve heard lately. The song rides its fiddle to an uncharacteristically joyful finish, as Bridgers exults: “I am not afraid / You won’t have to open a heart that’s broken / Water’s gonna flow in either way / My heart is growing either way.” Bridgers has tended to have such a cool personality on record that it’s bracing to hear her warm up to this degree.
And there’s more warmth where that came from. “Liberty Tree,” set in a mall near Burnham’s home territory in Massachusetts, sets some major-key fun over minor-key guitar chords, as Bridgers describes pulling her shirt up in a photo booth in the nearly abandoned shopping center, singing to her new love that there’s no harm in regressing a little: “Not getting any younger honey / But if we don’t try, how can we be sure.” The final thought there: “Don’t die, Bobby, before I die / It feels so good to have you in my life.” The beautifully simple “Other Plans” lets Bridgers explain how she thought this romance would be a passing thing: “I was gonna show you colors you had never seen / And leave you alone… / But our love had other plans for us.”
It might sound like a bifurcated album, with this many songs prompted by a dead man in her life and so many more inspired by a live wire. And maybe it is, in some ways. But she brings those two threads together thoughtfully in the final two songs. “As Above,” which borrows its chorus lyrics from the Lord’s Prayer, gets a lift from the album’s most haunting riff as Bridgers first sings some discomforting memories (“I thought about my mom driving herself to the hospital”) on the way to embracing the present, in a climax where she sets the quiet aside and uses her outside to wail: “You won’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen.” Now, that’s a hell of a vow.
The closing reprise of “Lost Weekend” juxtaposes the two main threads of the album even more closely: “He’s not coming back as a bird / He’s not coming back,” she keeps repeating about her father, sloughing off any hint of magical thinking, before offering a peaceful, dry elegy: “I still live by the things he taught me / Like how to forgive when they’re not sorry / And the government isn’t trying to kill you, they just don’t care if they kill you / I am my old man’s oldest son.” And then she turns her attention back to the one before her: “We’re gonna be alright, me and you / You love me, and I won’t ever let you forget / Not yet.” That’s kind of a qualified forever, but it’s a gorgeous one, in a denouement that sure makes it seem as if Bridgers has found more than she lost over this extended weekend.
Phoebe in mourning, or Phoebe madly in love? Either might have been captivating enough; together, they paint a vivid and invigorating picture of the highs and lows that make a life. No joke.
