In the six years since her last album, indie-folk icon Phoebe Bridgers has lived through love, heartbreak and the death of her father.
Released on Aug. 14, her new 16-track album “Lost Weekend” reflects those experiences, exploring themes of grief, aging, relationships and emotional detachment, departing from her usual style in ways that prove both beneficial and detrimental to the album as a whole.
“Lost Weekend” is a step in the right direction for Bridgers, who experiments with electronic, ambient, bluegrass and distorted instrumentation instead of relying on the cleaner indie-folk sound associated with her previous two albums, “Stranger in the Alps” released in 2017 and “Punisher” released in 2020.
The production of this album is more creative and stylized than her previous work, but her signature lyrical storytelling is noticeably sparse. As a result, many of the album’s songs feel underdeveloped and less emotionally resonant than the tracks that made her one of the genre’s most distinctive songwriters.
The album opens with eerie synthesizers and Bridgers’ resonant voice under a vocoder as she makes a morbid joke about her father’s funeral: “Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy.” Slow and relatively stripped of instrumentation, “The Outside” sounds bare and the lyrics similarly restrained. Despite the compelling production of the song, it lacks the elaborate imagery and lyrical complexity found throughout her other work, an imbalance that becomes increasingly common as the album progresses.
The following track, “Lost Boys” sounds almost jaunty, built around a folksy instrumental that feels far more hopeful and liberating than anything Bridgers has released before. This is one of the better songs on the album, as it carries both the stylish new sound as well as an interesting narrative about people who struggle with self-sabotage and refuse to grow up.
The fifth track, “Bobby,” written about Bridgers’ relationship with musician and comedian Bo Burnham, opens with a discordant collection of sounds before settling into a triumphant, almost childlike love song — the first one in her discography and a refreshing change in tone.
The 14th track, “I Can’t Wait,” is the album’s most successful example of this new style. It layers an unsettling, microtonal electronic voice under Bridgers’ vocals that shift abruptly into a bluegrass interlude. These songs best represent Bridgers’ journey outside of the clean indie-folk sound associated with her first two albums, while also highlighting the under-explored potential in this new direction.
The album’s biggest weakness is the writing. Usually praised for her poetic storytelling and ability to make ordinary experiences feel vivid and strange, Bridgers often abandons that strength on “Lost Weekend.” The eighth track, “Panorama” contains only five lines and functions more like ambient music, while track 11, “Never Going Back!” feels more like an interlude than a complete song.
The following track, “Other Plans,” is even more frustrating on this basis, consisting of a monotone melody built almost entirely around the same two piano chords. While minimalism can sometimes sound just as powerful as complex production, the restraint shown here sounds less intentional and more like the music wasn’t given enough time to become interesting.
The album is no doubt at its strongest when the new sound and emotional writing actually meet. “Still Standing,” the ninth track, is about Bridgers’ complicated relationship with her father and the internal conflict she had mourning a parent who caused her so much pain. The instrumentation is grounded in her classic style, built with various strings, a harmonica and her iconic banjo to create a sound that feels both bitter and warm. The song ends with Bridgers saying, “Thank you for everything,” as her reverbed humming slowly dies down, capturing the guilt, love and resentment that can exist within any relationship.
Track four, “The Governor’s Waltz,” achieves a similar feeling, pairing a simple fingerpicking pattern and dark piano chords that in tandem sound like a tragic fairy tale about an unhealthy relationship.
“Lost Weekend” is a clear departure from Bridgers’ previous discography, and I’m glad she made it. Its production is more creative and varied than what she has released before and suggests a compelling and exciting new direction for her future music. Still, I can’t help but feel that she sacrificed some of what made her previous work so great in order to focus on this new sound. Many of the songs lack the lyrically detailed, hard-hitting narratives that she’s known for.
This album proves that Bridgers can certainly make interesting music while deviating from the sound she’s known for, but for me, what made her music so compelling in the first place was the stories she was able to tell, and this album has far too many songs that fall short in that regard.
The weakest of her three albums, Phoebe Bridgers’ “Lost Weekend” earns three and a half out of five stars.
