Item: Lost Weekend
Rating: 10
Author: nme

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Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers reviewed by nme — 10/10 | Wavelength | Wavelength

indie’s poet laureate returns with a staggering, strange and stirring opus

On album opener ‘The Outside’, she enlists a vocoder, singing “Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy” in a robotic register as she articulates the feeling of dissociating onstage. On lead single ‘Lost Boys’, she writes about being resigned to the magnetism she seems to have for lost souls. In ‘Kill Me’, she captures the stomach-drop-inducing symptoms of descending into love. The song is a goosebump-inducing feast of guitars, sarangi, upright bass, strings, drums, mandolin and more. But the most staggering moment is the silent pause after she whispers “wait”, before she lands on realisations like “this is gonna kill me” and “let’s go missing” over sinister, distorted sounds. In the album bio, Bridgers talks about a desire for “emotional transfer from composer to listener”, and here and throughout the album she achieves this.

‘Lost Weekend’’s most poignant moments come when Bridgers wades in the dark underbelly of love, like on ‘The Governor’s Waltz’ when she acknowledges the similarity of herself and her ex’s new partner with a deprecating slight: “And she can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed on that stage / I have not lost any sleep / Being myself wasn’t easy, do it for me”. Despite shying away from the public, she’s unafraid to bare the details in her songs, such as an echoing “I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off” in ‘Lost Weekend’, or a voicemail recording from her dad in ‘Never Going Back!’.

There are multiple assists from those closest to Bridgers: Boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker assist on the country hymnal ‘Haunted’, and her partner, Bo Burnham, sings on ‘The Outside’, ‘Bobby’ and ‘Never Going Back!’. But even with the star-studded cast and pristine production (Bridgers alongside Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Jack Antonoff, and additional production by Alex G), Bridgers’ ability to write winking, candid, gut-punching liners – like the shift from “I loved you, and you couldn’t forgive me for that” on ‘Lost Weekend’ to “You love me, and I won’t ever let you forget” on closing track ‘Lost Weekend (Reprise)’ – remains the album’s main gravitational pull.

The phrase “lost weekend” has become shorthand for a self-inflicted, time-bound escape from reality – see: the 1945 film of the same name that follows a struggling New York writer on a four-day bender, or John Lennon’s infamous tear across Los Angeles during his separation from Yoko Ono. But Bridgers’ ‘Lost Weekend’ is the opposite of emotional evasion: more a reckoning with herself and the romantic and familial love and loss that have shaped her story and storytelling. It’s a feat that could only be achieved by a songwriter and musician self-assured in their penmanship and musicality, someone who may have started the journey of writing her third album feeling lost, but by the end wasn’t unmoored at all.

In the six years since Phoebe Bridgers delivered her critical darling, 2020’s ‘Punisher’, her life has been marked by seismic shifts – touring and picking up multiple Grammys with supergroup Boygenius, a public romance and breakup, and, in 2022, the loss of her father. But, according to Bridgers, it wasn’t just the chaos of life that prolonged the release of her third album, but a state of “world wear[iness]”, a yearning for a separation of church and state between the music she was making and the world it would exist in. Making peace with that dichotomy took time, time that gave ‘Lost Weekend’ room to evolve into a captivating record where she crafts expansive stories over strange sonics. On album opener ‘The Outside’, she enlists a vocoder, singing “Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy” in a robotic register as she articulates the feeling of dissociating onstage. On lead single ‘Lost Boys’, she writes about being resigned to the magnetism she seems to have for lost souls. In ‘Kill Me’, she captures the stomach-drop-inducing symptoms of descending into love. The song is a goosebump-inducing feast of guitars, sarangi, upright bass, strings, drums, mandolin and more. But the most staggering moment is the silent pause after she whispers “wait”, before she lands on realisations like “this is gonna kill me” and “let’s go missing” over sinister, distorted sounds. In the album bio, Bridgers talks about a desire for “emotional transfer from composer to listener”, and here and throughout the album she achieves this. ‘Lost Weekend’’s most poignant moments come when Bridgers wades in the dark underbelly of love, like on ‘The Governor’s Waltz’ when she acknowledges the similarity of herself and her ex’s new partner with a deprecating slight: “And she can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed on that stage / I have not lost any sleep / Being myself wasn’t easy, do it for me”. Despite shying away from the public, she’s unafraid to bare the details in her songs, such as an echoing “I’m supposed to be married, but I called it off” in ‘Lost Weekend’, or a voicemail recording from her dad in ‘Never Going Back!’. There are multiple assists from those closest to Bridgers: Boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker assist on the country hymnal ‘Haunted’, and her partner, Bo Burnham, sings on ‘The Outside’, ‘Bobby’ and ‘Never Going Back!’. But even with the star-studded cast and pristine production (Bridgers alongside Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Jack Antonoff, and additional production by Alex G), Bridgers’ ability to write winking, candid, gut-punching liners – like the shift from “I loved you, and you couldn’t forgive me for that” on ‘Lost Weekend’ to “You love me, and I won’t ever let you forget” on closing track ‘Lost Weekend (Reprise)’ – remains the album’s main gravitational pull. The phrase “lost weekend” has become shorthand for a self-inflicted, time-bound escape from reality – see: the 1945 film of the same name that follows a struggling New York writer on a four-day bender, or John Lennon’s infamous tear across Los Angeles during his separation from Yoko Ono. But Bridgers’ ‘Lost Weekend’ is the opposite of emotional evasion: more a reckoning with herself and the romantic and familial love and loss that have shaped her story and storytelling. It’s a feat that could only be achieved by a songwriter and musician self-assured in their penmanship and musicality, someone who may have started the journey of writing her third album feeling lost, but by the end wasn’t unmoored at all.