Album Review: Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers
From a nosebleed at the Governor’s Ball to a father’s voicemail, Lost Weekend follows one love behind Phoebe Bridgers long-awaited follow-up and is the year’s most complete piece of songwriting.
Through May and June, Phoebe Bridgers had small crowds in a handful of American cities, watched as a songwriter who’s barely even surfaced since the 2024 Grammys asked them to drop their phones into sealed pouches. Other than that unannounced night at Madison Square Garden on June 4, she hasn’t played anywhere. Late last month, the tracklist for her next album leaked—and, somewhat hilariously, it was posted by Bridgers herself. The highly-anticipated Lost Weekend is produced by Ethan Gruska, Jack Antonoff, and Tony Berg, and one name that keeps coming up among them is Bobby.
Bobby slow dances alone in his room, but he has to bend over to get through the door. She’s sung all sorts of songs about him following her home and has never done it before. In “Kill Me,” at a costume party where “the veil was thinning,” her hello kiss tasted “like a flower with chemical petals”; she swears he taught her that she knows nothing. She says, “Don’t die, Bobby/Before I die,” and he never does. Instead, she ends up piling domestic proof in “Bobby”: the two of them finally under one roof, her wearing a shirt of his, his singing in the shower while she talks to herself, stars on the ceiling, clothes on the floor, “a thing in a box I don’t touch anymore.” The banjo is, of course, held by Jack Antonoff, and the electric guitar is played by Justin Broadrick from Godflesh and Mike Kinsella from American Football. “Now I don’t know if I can make it tonight/But what are you doing the rest of my life, Bobby?,” comes from an old standard that someone flipped from your life to hers.
At the Governor’s Ball, Bridgers hide in the bathroom “like Shelley Duvall.” The man she meets there has a nosebleed, stands in her way, and reminds me of nothing. “The Governor’s Waltz” grows into two kids in a trench coat living alone who are too happy to feel at home, dancing themselves clean late on New Year’s Eve. This chorus section puts another woman in her place, and she’ll lose no sleep over it.
Six years after Punisher, she flies past the speed limit. A motorbike could do 90 in a 55, as she notes with the sweeping “Lost Boys”—perhaps headed to another life where they make you cut your hair. And if a rifle is the only way to get there, she’ll deal with the papers at the far end of the ride. The hook has Peter Pan’s gang: “Lost boys/Never spend their lunch money/And come find me.” An altogether more bittersweet reunion is the subject of the second verse, when Bridgers recalls being dumped in East Berlin, throwing a tantrum and getting clocked with a 57, the broken rib, and whatever he said about wishing he were dead—a thing she doesn’t believe, but still wonders how he’s sleeping without feeling guilty and apologizes for anyway.
No one could tell the two of them apart in the universe smog (“Lost Weekend”). And even as she turns the music down to parallel park, well, to be honest, the two of them really aren’t doing this for anyone but the two of them (“Then when the van broke down in the heatwave/You took off your pants, on the side of the freeway.”) “I had the thought, you would outlive me/I loved you, and you couldn’t forgive me for that,” she always remembers, a candy bar she’s not willing to share with the other kids in the sandbox who’ve filled her past with delight. So she empties the drawer, staggers in the heat, especially resentful to those she’s totally used and totally losing the plot—but she’s “supposed to be married,” and she “called it off.” And as he lies awake beside her, glow-in-the-dark with distaste, hand over her heart and packed with alrights, she flips her own freeway line back at him: “You know me, and I’ll never forgive you for that.” The great Bo Burnham shares writing credit.
The suitcase sits by the bed, “like you needed to know you could go whenever you wanted.” But instead, on “Still Standing,” she’s at the top of the stairs turning red, “pound for pound in a prom dress,” and somebody is trying to make her afraid. Because once, both were shining and indifferent, but instead wearing black, and still, “Sometimes I want you back/But not today.” In “As Above,” somewhere in the middle of the country, she’s making faces at the kid sitting next to her on a plane and trying not to look down—even if she’s a couple of days late. Acknowledging the scary coincidence of Air Force One flying above Omaha just as her mom is driving herself to the hospital, she lets on that though she doesn’t want to live forever, she doesn’t want to die, either—not before she takes him to Coney Island and lets him go screaming on the Wonder Wheel. And then on the reprise: the old man who “never made it a day in a shirt” and “ain’t coming back as a bird” still lives in her, teaching her to forgive people who ain’t sorry, though he never had her repeat his hardest lesson—“The government ain’t tryna kill you/They just don’t care if they kill you.” Somewhere between grieving for a son and being “my old man’s oldest son,” she’s turned a eulogy for a “dear friend” into a flip of an old hit, where she fought the wall, and the wall won.
Rating: 4.5
Favorite Track(s): “Lost Boys,” “Bobby,” “Lost Weekend,” “As Above”