August 15, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic listens to one of 2026’s most anticipated new albums, Lost Weekend, by indie-fave-turned-arena-filler Phoebe Bridgers, and finds a mix of experimentation, control and refracted memory that immediately separates it from the rest of her catalog.

Olof Grind

It’s been six years since Phoebe Bridgers released Punisher, the album that cemented her status as the most revered singer-songwriter of the selfie generation, and three since boygenius, the hugely popular best friends club she formed with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, released its triple-Grammy-winning album The Record. In that time, the once social media-loving Bridgers retreated from the public eye, reeling from the effects of fame, a complicated love life and the sudden death of her father. Friday she released her third solo album, Lost Weekend; it’s her account of that time, partly to satisfy her audience, but mostly, its unusual shape and complicated tone suggests, for herself.

Ambitious and enigmatic, highly collaborative but insistently personal, Lost Weekend asks a powerful question: How do you tell a story that includes so many contradictory elements, conflicting perspectives, shadowy corners and hidden passageways, it changes shape every time you touch it?

It isn’t a simple process. Over the 16 tracks that make up this capacious album, Bridgers starts and starts again: in the middle, at the end and at the beginning. Though Lost Weekend rewards an immersive listen, it’s a nonlinear experience, like looking through a scrapbook whose contents keep disintegrating. “I remember the day I created the world,” she murmurs at the beginning of “Other Plans,” a pivotal track that comes near the record’s end and points toward a tentative happy ending. “I got blood on my favorite shirt.” This is quintessential Bridgers, the unkempt magic of the everyday. A skilled confessionalist who thinks big while resisting pretense, here Bridgers combines a soaring metaphor with a self-deprecating zinger, suggesting that even a god might have shaky knife skills — or, since this song is actually about sex, might not notice it’s that time of the month.

In the past, Bridgers would have set this striking image within a pristine arrangement that let her words glow. But on Lost Weekend, the music does something different. Its subtle design plays into the mythopoeticism of the song’s first line without damaging the vulnerability of the second. Bridgers sings in a quavering monotone, answered by what sounds like an array of echoes: a muted piano, a chime in the distance, a phantom low-frequency hum. Suiting a song that equates a first sexual encounter with the primordial singularity, the sound of “Other Plans” seems to form beyond or even before the existence of time. But the main event described in this spare song isn’t as important as the first words Bridgers utters, I remember. The music’s vibrational hush carries the listener into that space where memories form, the real origin point of the world as anyone knows it.

The critic Hanif Abdurraqib once said that grief is an emotion that knocks on the door of memory, expressing gratitude for the chance it gives to encounter lost loves. Something similar could be said about new love — it knocks on the door of the future, which we can only really imagine within the context of the past. Banging on both doors at once in these songs, Bridgers discovers that behind them are more doors, and a hall of mirrors, and a staircase going nowhere, and a window with wavy glass that makes everything seem upside down. Her wit remains sharp, but she’s lost a little faith in the verity of the clearly told story. Using musical techniques and technologies partly informed by ambient music, on Lost Weekend she complicates things: a fragment of a song here, a strong tonal shift there, a surging chorus of guitars to show how feelings distort reality as much as they define it.

Bridgers has always been skilled at the impressionistic style of songwriting that allows a story to unfold via vivid, interconnected scenes rather than through a strong linear narrative. She’s known for getting to the heart of a conflict and especially for nailing others’ bad behavior: the two phone calls from her absent father in “Kyoto” crystallize her experience of abandonment, the deaths of a baby and a bird evoke romantic despair in “Moon Song.” The daring yet natural-feeling expansion of her sonic palette on Lost Weekend both enhances her lyrical close-ups and shows the ways in which they’re not entirely trustworthy. This new approach feels like a challenge to those who would simply call her a truth teller. Songs with spooky titles like “Haunted” and “As Above” ping with references to disorientation and unexplainable transformation: time travel and jet lag, lucid dreaming, magic and make-believe, the Lost Boys of Neverland and, upon first mention of her life-changing new man in a song called “Kill Me,” a mystery corpse that haunted an Australian beach for 70 years. “Let’s go missing,” an ominous chorus chants. Is this a love song? Yes and no.

For Bridgers, the quest for a more effective way to talk about the past — whether about painful childhood memories or the sparks that flew just a few years ago — is a high-stakes investigation demanding a major musical shift.

Read Ann Powers’ full review of Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend at NPR Music.

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