Phoebe Bridgers – ‘Lost Weekend’ review: indie’s poet laureate returns with a staggering, strange and stirring opus

In the six years since Phoebe Bridgers delivered her critical darling, 2020’s ‘Punisher’, her life has been marked by seismic shifts – touring and picking up multiple Grammys with supergroup Boygenius, a public romance and breakup, and, in 2022, the loss of her father. But, according to Bridgers, it wasn’t just the chaos of life that prolonged the release of her third album, but a state of “world wear[iness]”, a yearning for a separation of church and state between the music she was making and the world it would exist in. Making peace with that dichotomy took time, time that gave ‘Lost Weekend’ room to evolve into a captivating record where she crafts expansive stories over strange sonics. READ MORE: Nate Sib is finding peace and purpose in his pop mission On album opener ‘The Outside’, she enlists a vocoder, singing “Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy” in a robotic register as she articulates the feeling of dissociating onstage. On lead single ‘Lost Boys’, she writes about being resigned to the magnetism she seems to have for lost souls. In ‘Kill Me’, she captures the stomach-drop-inducing symptoms of descending into love. The song is a goosebump-inducing ...