After six years and a series of cheeky covers and collaborations Phoebe Bridgers is finally prepared to move back front and centre on her own story. The singer-songwriter has announced her third full-length record Lost Weekend will be released on 14 th August via Dead Oceans. The announcement arrives with the subtle power of an artist who has always worked best through hidden interaction, only a few weeks after a series of covert phone-free gigs cemented the excitement.
Between 2020’s Punisher and Pearly Gates, the length of the hiatus seemed longer than the difference in years should have been. In that span, Bridgers co-founded the world-changing boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, picked up five Grammys, toured with Eras, her name on a different schedule entirely, though through it all she’s been producing music with her signature acerbic sincerity. Fans of the lone singer-songwriter we met on Stranger in the Alps and Punisher have longed for her signature to appear.
Now it is. Lost Weekend is her longest to date, with sixteen tracks. The first single, Lost Boys, came out the day after the album was announced, and it instantly felt like a Bridgers cut, regretful and wistful but playful and insidiously melodic. Reports from her spring pop-up shows talk about new songs that broaden her scope without sacrificing the intimacy she’s known for, some tracks bulking up and becoming more melodically expansive; others remaining sparse and close to the way she’d sounded in her previous releases. The way to the album has been exactly the kind of lowkey that you would expect. After none announced short club stops kicked off the year (beginning in Roswell, New Mexico), it grew by word of mouth.
Her final run was a surprise gig at Madison Square Garden, where the audience was asked to turn off their phones and listen. The day after she announced The Lost Tour, a screening-free arena run that launches in September and continues into December, with Alex G alongside in North America and Isaac Wood in Europe. The choice to keep the shows full of bodies, not screens, feels very much in line with an artist who has always prized presence over documentation.
We also see collaborators from her previous band return, like Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, as well as rumors of Jack Antonoff. The track list, announced at the end of July, features song names like The Outside, Kill Me, The Governor’s Waltz Bobby Haunted, and the album title. Especially, some titles include the word lost, which could hint at a narrative thread of alienation, remembering, or the odd liberation of being adrift.
To many listeners, Bridgers has typically written about the space between people and the silent sorrow of maintaining a connection. Punisher caught that wave at the height of our collective retreat. Lost Weekend enters an entirely different climate and yet the types of questions she poses here are nothing novel. What elements do we hold onto when everything else changes? How do we return to ourselves after so many years of becoming something greater?
