Phoebe Bridgers Comes Back to Earth

“Lost Weekend” announces itself as a return from time spent in the wilderness. “WIFE IS HOME FROM WAR,” read one typically parasocial fan comment on a promotional Instagram post. “Lemme up my medication in advance,” read another—Bridgers’s fans like to joke about the emotionally devastating effect of her music. Yet the album begins not with catharsis but with dissociation. On the opening track, “The Outside,” Bridgers sings through a vocoder, multiplying her voice into a metallic swarm. From this alien-drone perspective, she narrates two scenes: in the first verse, her father’s funeral; in the second, performing onstage. The song is about not being able to inhabit either experience fully. “I am on the outside, watching,” goes the uncharacteristically laconic chorus, as the vocoder drops away.

Bridgers’s great trick, though, is to set these two experiences against one another as a diptych. A “fist through the drywall” in the first verse glances off a “fist in the air” in the second; “I’ll watch him get carried away,” already suggestive of both a funeral procession and a violent outburst, is answered in the second verse with “Ohio, carry me away.” This is an image of crowd-surfing, but it is also a nod to a song by Sun Kil Moon, a formative influence on Bridgers whose creator, Mark Kozelek, has himself been known to fly into nasty tirades in public. (Separately, Kozelek has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women. He denies all allegations of wrongdoing.) Zoning out and leaving your body starts to look less like a defense mechanism and more like a poetic device for revealing hidden patterns of experience. Dissociation becomes its opposite: a kind of imaginative association.

In an early interview, Bridgers mentioned wanting to be “one of those artists that . . . could release an electronic record or a country record next, and nobody would be surprised.” Some eight years later, no one would exactly describe her in those terms. Her first two albums have distinct sonic identities, but the songs sometimes bleed into one another. She has a finely tuned ear for melody, but she is not a writer of earworms; her melodies tend to follow the lateral, associative chain of her lyrics. They take hold after repeat listens. Listening to her music again and again, in fact, is the key to seeing the larger shape of her ambition. Bridgers is not a serial self-reinventor like David Bowie or even Joni Mitchell—she is a polisher and a honer. She is the kind of artist who seems to have two or three basic musical templates for songs and is constantly creating new versions of them. (The clearest-cut case is boygenius’s “Letter to An Old Poet,” which interpolates and updates the earlier “Me & My Dog,” Bridgers’s signature song on the band’s first album.)

“Lost Weekend” is the first Bridgers album to take full advantage of her music’s extreme consistency. It is also the most cohesive and sonically immersive of her records, thanks to her intricate co-production with her usual collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, along with the newcomers Jack Antonoff and Alex G. A crowded room of guests fills out the sound; some even briefly steal the show, as in the poignant harmony vocals by one “Son-John Johnson,” which can only be a pseudonym for the wobbly-voiced indie-rock singer Cameron Winter. The atmosphere of the album is not too far off from the soft-focus glow of “Punisher,” but some of the dials are cranked way up: Bridgers has said that she’s been listening to a lot of ambient music, and it shows. Dreamy interludes pad the space between tracks with humming synths and strings; sometimes songs dissolve into floating mood pieces, anchored by a drone or loop. If you give “Lost Weekend” the right kind of attention, you might get the sense that it does not consist of individual songs so much as a vast nebula of sound, from which fragments of music flash out, and into which they eventually subside. Appropriately, leading up to the album’s release, Bridgers organized special listening sessions in planetariums.

Figures go down into the cosmic foam, only to turn up later in different forms. “Lost Boys,” the album’s first single, gathers a whirl of images of prolonged adolescence: speeding motorcycles, violent tantrums, twin beds. Each verse seems to address a potentially different “you,” or perhaps a composite person who comes off as a charming but exasperating man-child. But then the triumphant final chorus embraces every possible nettlesome “you” at once: “Lost boys / Come find me / Yeah!” It’s an incredible moment of rock-and-roll reconciliation, on par with the climactic “You are forgiven!” in the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away.”