Buried in the sickly blue-green light and haunting chords of Phoebe Bridgers’ new album “Lost Weekend” is a story of perseverance and growth in the face of heartbreak.
“Lost Weekend” is the artist's first solo album release since “Punisher” in 2020. After the release of boygenius’s “the record” in 2023, Bridgers toured and released music as part of the indie-rock trio. She’s now circling back to a solo career.
The new album will feel familiar to Bridgers fans. Many of the songs use the same acoustic indie and folk sounds her other records are known for.
However, the new era of her music is marked by sound experimentation that wasn't present in Bridgers' past releases. Many of the album's tracks include vocal distortion, echoing harmonies and long instrumental segments.
The album opens with “The Outside,” which I found to be the clearest example of Bridgers' experimental style. The track utilizes a vocoder — a speech coding tool — to distort Bridgers’ voice into a strange, almost robotic sound.
The same electronic sound was also used at the beginning of the album's second track, “Lost Boys,” which was released as a single in June.
Each song on the album feels entirely distinct from the others; some are folksy while others feel more classically indie-pop. Like many of Bridgers’ past releases, the album has a solid mix of upbeat and slow tracks.
Throughout all the tracks — including the happier ones — are strange, eerie chord progressions and ghostly vocals almost reminiscent of a horror movie soundtrack.
“The Governor's Waltz,” my personal favorite from the album, is about a happy relationship and the underlying anxieties that accompany it.
The song starts with a positive, fairytale feeling. But as it nears the end, the background vocals grow louder and more ominous, mirroring the feeling of being “too happy to feel at home” that the song portrays.
Much of the album is also about Bridgers’ experience as a musician and her relationships throughout it.
Between laments about lost friendships and calling off a past engagement in the album’s title track, “Lost Weekend,” Bridgers refers to life as a musician as “surviving [her] gift until [she] gets shot,” a very bleak outlook on a life spent on the road and performing.
But the album conveys a much more hopeful feeling by the end. “Lost Weekend Reprise,” the album's closing track, finishes the album off with the line “But we’re gonna be alright, me and you,” showing growth and hope that wasn’t present in the original song.
With the album’s release comes a new aesthetic for Bridgers that she carries through the music and lyric videos for the album and her “Lost Tour,” which begins next month.
The new look consists of both fantasy and sci-fi elements, complete with blue-greens and purples, stars and medieval script. Each video is filled with dancing colored lights illuminating a dark sky or water.
Despite the album’s whimsical aesthetics, it still manages to feel very human, which is what Bridgers is known for.
The music video for “I Can’t Wait” originally matches the slightly strange vibe of the album and places the viewer in the eye of a spindly legged bug exploring a city. However, as the video progresses, we watch the love of families and couples bring the video to life.
Similarly, the otherwise spooky background vocals of the songs are often sung by Bridgers’ friends, and many of them are also collaborators on various tracks. Even Bridgers’ partner, musician Bo Burnham, is involved in the album, both as a songwriter and as the focal point of the song “Bobby.”
This sense of love and hopefulness speaks the loudest throughout the album, making it stand out from some of Bridgers’ work as both a solo musician and member of boygenius.
Contact Brandy Sumner at bsumner@alligator.org.
Brandy Sumner is an anthropology and English junior and this summer's music and performance reporter. This is their first semester working at the Alligator. In their free time they enjoy playing guitar, reading and writing.
