Premature Evaluation: Phoebe Bridgers Lost Weekend

If there’s a way to listen to “The Outside” without sobbing, I have not yet discovered it. The four-minute opening track to Lost Weekend, the highly anticipated followup to Phoebe Bridgers' 2020 masterpiece Punisher, starts with a joke about death delivered through a vocoder before her true whispery lilts emerge. With her voice obscured in mechanical distortion, she recounts her father being carried away in a casket, and then herself being carried away in a crowd. The music flits between icy, isolated emptiness and soft, enchanting piano as she shifts in and out of dissociation. Punisher was full of moments that felt crushing, but not quite as brutally as this.Punisher, released when she was 25, helped the now-31-year-old Los Angeles singer-songwriter break out of niche indie fame and into mainstream recognition. Its timely themes of isolation and sadness in the midst of the pandemic certainly played a part in its success, and the lush, quiet sound was a satisfying backdrop for her musings, which were carefully crafted to strike the perfect balance of heartbreaking and whimsical, a skill that many musicians have since tried and failed to emulate. Her tendency to reach for quips in ...