I was all ready to dive into one of the biggest albums of the year, Charli XcX’s Music, Fashion, Film in September’s podcast, but it turns out it wasn’t the only huge album out this summer by a female artist with obsessive fans and a lore to back it up. Phoebe Bridgers may be a very different artist, but her new album – Lost Weekend – comes with all the attention of XcX’s and even loftier ratings (currently listed as the highest ranked album on metacritic of 2026, clocking in at 91 on its release day). And while we’d have had a lot to say about the former, it feels like everything that could’ve been written about Music, Fashion, Film may already have been done in the month since it was released. Bridgers’ new album is barely a week old.
Charli’s record has rightly generated a monstrous amount of attention in the last few months, with its pivot to fuzzy guitars and meta musings on where you go as an artist after an album as mega as Brat in 2024. But for Bridgers, whose last album, the Covid-era Punisher took her from indie darling to global star in a time when she didn’t even leave her home, the gap between solo records has been much longer, and with it, ever-growing great expectations. Bridgers hasn’t spent the time idly; finally touring that record took up a significant chunk of time, after which she teamed up with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker as Boygenius, whose album the record was a huge pod highlight in 2023 and into 2024 as the trio toured, and the time I was first fully attuned to Bridgers as an artist.
Full disclosure: I am no Bridgers completeist, though I’ve listened to her earlier work since then. I’m aware that there’s a significant and dedicated fanbase and lore to accompany her career, but I’m both too late to the party and way too old to be likely to align with them. So playing catchup, I’m finding myself getting knee-deep into her music now, while also feeling the weight of that dedication and history too, such has been the discourse around her ever since her breakout record. I’ll reference what I find, but more than aware I’ll get things wrong or miss them out. Her life as a tabloid subject also looms around this record – her much-reported relationship with Paul Mescal, the fallout from it and subsequent one with Bo Burnham – as inevitable context for its subject matter, but the themes are far more universal than just her own life. And don’t the best artists take their own experience and find a way to make it connect with every listener?
So, to my growing love for Phoebe: I adored boygenius, my gateway drug to Bridgers. It was a slow burner through 2023 and into 2024, brought to my attention by Nolan. I had been aware of her in the music world before then, as much on Twitter (ok, X, RIP good Twitter) where she was pretty outspoken at the time. There was something interesting about an artist who lived very much in the eye of their fans and the public. But for me this started with the trio of Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. The album came at a time when I was starting to find my way with artists that were ‘country adjacent’ (nodded to in Spin It from Episode 45. It seemed to hit this sweet spot of country, rock, americana and Appalachian music, with guitars and banjos, ballads and storming throwdowns, and the joy of an all-female group doing it their way has really stuck with me. It has stayed with me ever since. That ‘conversion’ probably goes all the way back to Kevin Morby’s Oh My God (chosen as AOTM by Joey, interestingly, the month before we did our first podcast episode in July 2019) where the seeds were sown, even if that’s only a little bit country. It’s also the year that Joey and Nolan picked Punisher in their top 10 albums so it’s good to have early adopters around for the discussion too. I feel I’m always late to the dance! I took in Hurray For The Riff Raff, Waxahatchee and Big Thief in 2022, and by 2025, after boygenius took my heart, I was even nominating Lucy Dacus as my own album of the month, with Forever Is A Feeling. I guess what I’m saying is that while I am never going to be moving to Nashville, there’s a chunk of the ‘country venn diagram’ that I’d never have got near without this beautiful place, and that’s why I love the country/folk nexus that’s opened me up to so many great artists. So really it’s not a big surprise why I’ve chosen this album.
I knew the hype was huge, but I didn’t have much expectation given my lack of exposure to her solo work. When I’d heard Lost Boys as the lead single, popping up in the algorithm, I thought: “bloody hell, if the album is as good as this, I may have found myself a new musical infatuation.” It rocked, Bridger’s voice feeling more gutsy than my previous experience, the ‘boys’ a cipher in a broadside to toxic masculinity that calls out the bubbles that communities exist in. It sounds big, vital and an intended statement that pushes back on the reductive ‘sad girl music’ label she’s so often tagged with. Even without much background to her, I’ve never seen her music as that specific. It’s far more amorphous and interesting than this. I can see why the label persisted, but the more I’ve read and listened, it feels like Bridgers’ world is so much bigger than that: mortality, love, loss, family, grief, compassion and also fun. And there’s a lot of that on this record to me.
What I got when the album dropped surprised me. I am not sure many were expecting the electronic fingerprints all over the opening track, The Outside. Heavily vocoded/autotuned, into a disembodied chorus of Bridgers, it opined “crying in a suit and tie / but you should see the other guy”. The effects were such that you’d have barely known it was Bridgers at all. It pointed to a wider sonic palette, and perhaps a sign that this wasn’t going to be Punisher 2, whether that pleased fans or not. Straight away, we were into familiar lyrical territory, with Bridgers’ father and her fractured relationship, only this time he’s no longer here. There’s the gallows humour of his funeral, the layers of grief that envelop not just your searing loss for someone but also the complexities of their behaviour and its effect on you. It’s these moments that seem to land hardest, where Bridgers mines her own life to weave a rich narrative about the lack of binary emotions. Life, love and loss is complex, and music is never better than when it’s painted in shades.
The album is long, by relative standards of indie/folk. At 16 tracks and 52 minutes, there will inevitably be moments of different energy, pace and feeling. Some of these may be felt to be surplus to requirements, but none feel that way to me right now. The glare of a new album, a new artist, often means – to me at least – that properly wrapping yourself in an album by an artist at the top of their game means remembering some objectivity as you try and view the whole and its parts. For me, the more I’ve listened to it, the more it’s made sense: for all the big sound of Bobby – an obvious paean to Burnham and the glow of new love that feels so bright it’s unsettling – and Haunted and Never Going Back’s rootsy energy, tracks that will surely sound good in stadia around the world, it’s the dynamics between tracks and within tracks that are most appealing, and start to sew it together into a really cohesive whole.
A lot of the time, the album steps between light/dark and lively/quiet tracks, highlighting both Bridgers’ desire to step out of her ethereal zone into something bigger and broader. Jack Antonoff may be the easy explanation, but he features across the whole record here, even though his fingerprints seem most clear on the poppier tracks. But I find the slow-burning power of Kill Me (nodding to the almost destructive nature of new love and all the fear of being vulnerable) and the gossamer texture of The Governer’s Waltz – treading through the wreckage of her time with Mescal – and the half-songs of Panorama and Lost Parade – where layers of distortion and synths accompany the folk/indie template, as beguiling as any of the more obviously approachable tracks. It’s a much subtler and more fascinating progression than what I’ve heard on Punisher, and I am all the more excited by it and the willingness to push boundaries. I can see this may be a dividing line for some, but it’s a reason to draw me in. The list of collaborators is bewildering, between Antonoff, her Boygenius bandmates, Burnham, Cameron Winter and many, many others, but it also lends a collegiate, collective feel to a solo album that can often feel like a very individual endeavour.
There are also a selection – Bobby, Lost Weekend, Liberty Tree – where outros change the feeling of the track (on Lost Weekend, I feel the energy of Sufjan Steven’s The Ascension, but there are so many touchpoints to discuss. I’ve struggled with these before, notably on the Blood Orange record last year , but these feel part of the ‘being’ of the album, intentionally not wanting the listener to settle, a restless energy all of its own. Never Going Back also fades out with a voicemail from Bridgers’ father, willing to add the extremely personal to give another layer of context to the album. It’s a familial complexity writ large here, with Still Standing matter-of-factly telling of the domestic abuse her mother suffered at his hands. Lost Weekend is also dedicated to him, again finding parallel emotions of loss, indifference and pain blended into one relationship, the antithesis of syrupy, simple remembrance that music can fall into.
It’s an album that crosses over wider points too: from the toxic masculinity of Lost Boys, to wider themes of dislocation and distance, from the world of social media and existing on technology over connection, to the intoxication of love, and the desolation of grief, and the sheer overwhelming nature of the cruelest of worlds we live in (the Lost Weekend’s Reprise includes the devastating couplet: “the government isn’t trying to kill you. They just don’t care if they kill you.”). Lyrically I feel I’m only just getting into Lost Weekend, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that Bridgers’ flair for breathtaking lyrics is perhaps her most impressive quality. If Punisher was an album built on the loneliness of Covid America and a fear for what may follow, Lost Weekend seems to fully immerse itself in the anxiety and bleakness of the current world, with Trump’s America at its centre, and all the performative cruelty it thrives on.
Bridgers is no stranger to stirring up enemies with her honesty and strong moral core, having been open about her own abortion after Roe v Wade was overturned, donating money from her concerts to Trans Rights and confronting the toxicity of her former relationship with Ryan Adams, but this honesty also allows her to offer hope. While she’s actively stepped back from social media after being a hugely online person, she’s still clearly dialled into what is going on in the world, choosing to communicate through her songs rather than 256 characters. For all the lazy ‘sad girl’ commentary, I also found this album to be uplifting and forward-looking. While she may not have all the answers, Bridgers wants to keep going, to keep exploring the complexities of life, and sharing them with the world. And I think this is where much of the connection comes from: her ability to find common ground in her own experiences, and weave them into songs that we all feel chime with our own existence.
This may be a deeply personal album, following the community of Boygenius adventure, but it’s the sound of someone that wants to explore, and move their own work onwards. And for that I am very much infatuated. I can’t wait to see what you think.
thisisnothappening.net 