“I’ve been known to throw a tantrum when things are not the way I imagine them,” Phoebe Bridgers confesses on the title track to her third solo album Lost Weekend. In the six years since her star-solidifying pandemic album Punisher, she’s gone from indie darling to go-to collaborator for pop heavyweights like Taylor Swift, The 1975, and SZA. With her boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker by her side, she walked out of the 2024 Grammys as the evening’s most-awarded artist. Between those milestones, she lost her dad, endured heartbreak at the hands of someone she thought she’d marry, and dared to fall in love again. Bridgers broke out in 2017 with “Motion Sickness,” a breezy Americana kiss-off to the older, successful ex-boyfriend and former mentor who left her numb and reticent. Her subsequent debut album Stranger In the Alps drew warranted comparisons to her late idol Elliott Smith, not only in its elegant double-tracked vocal melodies but in the way she could stir up big feelings from such tranquil, understated compositions. Smith is even the subject of Punisher’s dreamy title track, on which Bridgers peruses his old stomping grounds and finds strange relief in knowing she’ll never embarrass herself in front of her hero: “I love a good place to hide in plain sight,” she sang, always careful to keep her guard up. But now, Bridgers is almost as old as Smith was when he died in 2003 at 34. She’s headlining venues larger than any he had the chance to play. The stakes are high, and fittingly, Lost Weekend is Bridgers’ most daring, optimistic record yet. Throughout Lost Weekend, Bridgers is enjoying the life she’s built for herself while simultaneously coping with everything it’s cost her. Through the heavy vocoder of Kid A-cribbing opener “The Outside,” Bridgers recalls confidently stagediving and belting out her finale (and almost certainly drops a lyrical reference to her onetime collaborators in the National); she’s happy in the spotlight, perhaps at the expense of feeling some distance once she’s off the stage. She hints at that rift again on “The Governor’s Waltz,” a somewhat cutesy, ¾-time jangle about feeling stifled in a relationship: “You promised that you’d never leave / But maybe you’ll do it for me,” she pleads, sounding like she’s suffocated—or, at the very least, annoyed. She doesn’t even particularly mind when her ex moves on to another, slightly younger famous singer-songwriter; Bridgers is too busy chasing her own success to lose sleep over it. If there was any doubt that Bridgers is a generational talent, the credits of Lost Weekend  might crush it: she co-produced the album with returning collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, as well as new teammate Jack Antonoff, whose big-pop instincts come through on triumphant tracks like “Lost Boys” and “Bobby.” Additional production comes from Bridgers’ upcoming tourmate Alex G, a co-writer on “Lost Boys” and “Haunted” who brings his distinct eerie, distorted touch to moodier moments like “Lost Weekend” and “Panorama.” His presence makes for some of the most exciting, unexpected production choices in Bridgers’ catalog yet. Her longtime colleagues Christian Lee Hutson, Marshall Vore, and Lucy Dacus also get songwriting credits, while Blake Mills, Jon Brion, Conor Oberst, American Football’s Mike Kinsella, the bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, and some guy named Son-John Johnson (whose warble sure sounds a lot like Geese’s Cameron Winter) round out the laundry list of guest performers. But one of the album’s most notable contributors is Bridgers’ boyfriend Bo Burnham, who co-wrote seven of its sixteen songs and serves as a primary muse. “Bobby,” which sounds like a Sheryl Crow hit by way of Rocket-era Alex G, blissfully recalls slipping into a love so certain it could render all other forms of desire obsolete: “I don’t know if I can make it tonight / But what are you doing the rest of my life?” She posits that a broken heart is easier to open up again on the twangy “Haunted”—a refreshingly bold stance—while the upbeat, almost frenetic “Liberty Tree” suggests that falling in love this time is powerful enough to erode the memory of prior woes: “The past is looking brighter all the time.” But all this joy is bittersweet, Lost Weekend argues, in the wake of Bridgers’ father’s death. As she tells it, their relationship was complicated, marred by his one-foot-out-the-door attitude and at least one angry outburst gone violent: “I found her bleeding over the sink / But when you said ‘sorry,’ you were looking at me,” she confesses on the gentle ballad “Still Standing.” The ramshackle campfire singalong of “Never Going Back!”—“Never going back again / The way it used to be is not the way that it is”—carries a heavier, multidimensional weight when paired with a voicemail from her dad (“Being a rock star takes up a lot of your time, I guess,” he chuckles over banjo strums). The existentialism in the face of tragedy reaches its peak on the massive “As Above,” where Bridgers remembers being particularly affected by a movie “where they go back in time” and takes it upon herself to shoulder some intense burdens: “You won’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen,” she belts until she cracks, one of the most staggering vocal performances she’s ever recorded. Death, in literal and metaphorical forms, has always been a guiding light of Phoebe Bridgers’ songwriting. “Yeah, I guess the end is near,” she shrugged in the final lines to Punisher, sounding more unaffected than bereaved. Endings—of relationships, of life cycles, of certain habits—make their presence known all over Lost Weekend, but the difference here is that Bridgers sounds ready to embrace them and all that they entail. “This could be the end,” she sings on “Bobby,” as if signaling the rest of her life to begin. [Dead Oceans] Abby Jones is a contributor to Paste whose writing has also appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, and more. She lives in Brooklyn. Follow her on X (@abbyfjones_) or email her at [email protected].