Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Weekend review - this is real songwriting
The Times - 5 August 2026
Will Hodgkinson - Chief Rock and Pop Critic
Lost Weekend
Dead Oceans
★★★★★
https://www.thetimes.com/article/a4c87ad1-bafe-48b6-a6ca-5393a7822513
An unassuming singer-songwriter from Pasadena, California, has unwittingly become one of the main influences on modern pop. Taylor Swift, Lorde and — in a particularly brazen fashion — Gracie Abrams have all borrowed from Phoebe Bridgers’ soft-voiced, lyrically intimate approach. Listening to Bridgers’ first album since 2020’s Punisher though, you realise how much of the subtleties in the songs remain hers alone. None of the more glittering pop stars taking a leaf out of Bridgers’ book has come up with a line of such quiet devastation as “He kissed me hello. He tasted like a flower with chemicals” as Bridgers does on Kill Me.
The success of Punisher must have put a lot of pressure on Bridgers: a figure from the generally ignored world of alternative rock finding herself thrust into the glare of a wider public. After its release she dealt with the sudden exposure either by finding safety in numbers, forming a supergroup called Boygenius with the similarly minded songwriters Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, or by lending her services to bigger names with Swift, SZA and Paul McCartney among them. Now we’re hearing about the discombobulation such unexpected attention brought on the kind of person who, you suspect, would be happiest chatting about the genius of Elliot Smith to a handful of people in faded T-shirts at some gritty backyard dive.
“I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball,” she sings over gently picked acoustic guitar and haunted harmonies on The Governor’s Waltz, citing a massive New York festival where she appeared in 2021 and again in 2025. In case this could be taken as a boast, Bridgers continues, “Hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall” — comparing herself to Duvall as a crazed Jack Nicholson comes at her with an axe in The Shining. Then there is The Outside, on which Bridgers, her voice given robotic distance by a vocoder, remembers crowdsurfing at a gig and realising she’s no longer a part of the crowd. She is now the star, with all the objectification and distance that brings.
With Lost Weekend, however, Bridgers hasn’t made the standard post-breakout album on the pressures of fame. She has written from the perspective of a normal person who has found herself famous and as such there is no shortage of stories from everyday life. Bobby is an indie rock portrait of the first flushes of love and lust, complete with memories of wearing the titular Bobby’s shirt while he sings in the shower. Then there is Still Standing, an oddly disembodied song about the death of Bridgers’ father, which eschews the usual sentiments of grief for more conflicted realities: indifference, resentment, guilt.
In truth, none of this has much to do with mainstream pop. From the loose, discordant strum of Never Going Back Again! (another song about her dad) to the bright melody of the ode to innocence Lost Boys, this is music in the lineage of troubled souls from Neil Young to Kurt Cobain. Over an organ hum, Lost Weekend details the breakdown of her relationship with the Irish actor Paul Mescal, who is now going out with — irony of ironies — Abrams. “She can pretend to be me,” Bridgers accepts of her former boyfriend’s new girlfriend on The Governor’s Waltz. “Since she took my place in my bed, on that stage, I have not lost any sleep.” Pretending is the word: deeply personal songwriting of such craft and artistry as this is impossible to emulate.