Star rating: 4/5
It’s 11pm and the lights are out. Everything around me has dissolved into darkness, save for the dim red glow from the tip of the airplane’s left wing and the brightness of my computer screen as I write this. Luckily, there is no setting more appropriate to listen to Phoebe Bridgers’ new album, “Lost Weekend”, than this. Caught between the ground below and the endless void outside, it feels almost as though this is precisely how the album was meant to be heard.
Bridgers’ fascination with the unearthly is no secret to anyone familiar with her brand. Ghosts, haunted houses, and aliens have followed her since her debut, “Stranger in the Alps” (2017). In her sophomore project “Punisher”, these themes take new dimensions, exemplified in the quintessential closer “I Know the End”. But it is only in her third studio project, “Lost Weekend”, that Bridgers’ enmeshment with the cosmos becomes the world the music inhabits; an album where endings take centre stage, whether of relationships, eras, or life itself, and the present is ever-elusive.
After a six-year solo hiatus, Phoebe Bridgers is also at her vaguest. Her lyrics were always known for their eccentric and abstract metaphors, but here they are sparser and more evasive; it appears she is more concerned with embracing the atmosphere than explaining herself to the audience. As a singer-songwriter, Bridgers has made a career out of her deeply personal, witty and gut-wrenching lyricism. “Lost Weekend”, however, isn’t as instantly gratifying as her fleshier works for this very reason: it requires time to acclimate, and invites the listener to find catharsis through its soundscape instead.
Sonically, the palette is much wider than before. Although older touchstones remain, such as Elliott Smith’s omnipresence, contemporary influences are infused through a wide array of collaborators. For instance, “Lost Boys”, with its fantasy-flavoured music video, is Bridgers at her most Alex G, who is also a prominent collaborator on the project. Electronic textures abound, in keeping with the glitchy, distorted album cover. Influenced by drone music, songs like “The Outside” (where she sings in a heavily auto-tuned robotic voice), “Panorama”, and “Lost Weekend” bring intricate instrumental arrangements. Showcasing her eclecticism, Bridgers features angelic choral moments on “The Governor’s Waltz” and “Still Standing”.
Another novelty is the American singer’s decision to avoid Melodyne, the pitch correction software, entirely. At times, I found that the raw vocals distracted from the pristine production and well-crafted lyrics. This choice, although sonically underwhelming to some listeners, is commendable: a commitment to sincerity that adds another layer to the album’s contrast between the human and the virtual.
At its core, “Lost Weekend” is a record of absences. The passing of Bridgers’ father in 2023 is felt across the whole tracklist. “Still Standing”, particularly, is a personal highlight in her discography. The song drifts between her childhood memories of her father to her dressed in black clothes in mourning of his death, as if standing immobile in the same spot as time overlaps like scenes in a film reel. A masterful portrayal of the conflicting feelings that arise when grief is accompanied by anger (as expressed prior in “Kyoto”), resignation, and, ultimately, acceptance of our finitude. Despite the violence, Phoebe ends the song with the utmost image of gratitude, thanking her dad for everything — the love and the loss.
But this is not an album in which sadness is sovereign. Love is an equally pervasive force, often embodied by the character of Bobby (the nickname of actor, comedian, and musician Bo Burnham), who appears in the eponymous “Bobby”, “Kill Me” and “Liberty Tree”. Bridgers captures the dizziness of falling in love amid personal tragedy, confusion, and dissolution of other relationships. In “Bobby,” the repeated refrain, “this could be the end of wasting / this could be the end” places love and annihilation side by side: falling in love can feel simultaneously like an escape from a previous life and an encounter with its own impermanence.
The record develops this dialectic further on “I Can’t Wait”, where she finds her own warring halves finally reconciled in a Jekyll-and-Hyde image: “All my life / side by side / Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde / finally together.” Contradiction learns to coexist: love alongside grief, renewal alongside dissolution, and the beginning of a relationship alongside the loss of a parent.
The idea reaches its fullest form in the album’s thesis-statement piece, “As Above”. The title, shortened from “As above, so below”, is borrowed from an ancient foundational text of Hermeticism attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It holds that the universe and earth, the spiritual and the physical, mirror and correspond to one another.
The song presents this philosophy through a real-life, present-day scene: Bridgers on a plane, avoiding looking out the window, worrying about a possible pregnancy, and watching a time-travel film that affects her unexpectedly. Suspended in the sky, she’s neither truly above (in heaven), nor below (on earth). In a limbo where time barely seems to move, going back to the past starts to feel possible.
In the second verse, Bridgers does just that, beginning her journey backwards through glimpses of her past: Omaha, where her first album was mixed and where her former partner and collaborator Conor Oberst was born; and her mother, apparently injured, driving herself to the hospital because no one was around to care for her. As these memories surface, her anxieties begin to accumulate, turning her reflections on the past towards an apprehension of death. The song ultimately resolves in “As it was, so it goes,” a cyclical formulation that seems to encompass the duality of everything that precedes it: past and present, mother and child, old love and new.
At times, “Lost Weekend” feels like looking up from the bottom of a lake at the fishes swimming above; at others, like floating in the silent vacuum of outer space. Some songs capture the feeling of complete earthly existence, such as “Haunted” — the most acoustic and traditional song on the album in terms of production — which nods to her first record and her work with Boygenius.
Its raw vocals sing a message of utterly human hope amid the surrounding surrealism of the album. In contrast, songs like “Panorama” and “The Outside” sound somewhat alien. But, perhaps, that is precisely the album’s synthesis: as above, so below. Human existence cannot be separated into what is mundane and what is otherworldly. It’s all experience.
Phoebe Bridgers ends “Lost Weekend” looking up at a starless sky, contemplating the death of fantasy and the pain of reality, and still managing to let us know that we’re going to be alright. She has not let the wait dull our love for her. We’ll keep coming back for more.
