The poster girl and flagbearer of all indie sad girl music has finally made her solo album return after six years, not accounting for her recent work with her three-headed femme depression music behemoth, boygenius, with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
Lost Weekend still has tinges of the Boo! Haunted House/Serial Killer charms her critically acclaimed album Punisher (2020) and her debut record Stranger in the Alps (2017), wrapped in a refined sonic identity she has now perfected with sheens of indie rock, folk, country, and shoegaze influences. That 2017 debut was the explosive entry point, with tracks like "Motion Sickness" and "Scott Street" turning melancholic reflections on growing up and on dating men who treat you astonishingly badly into a genre unto itself.
Her sophomore smash hit of a record, Punisher, which many see as essentially a perfect singer-songwriter album, as the songwriter wore her love for Elliott Smith on her sleeve with the lo-fi, baroque-pop aesthetic that has become synonymous with her music.
A Bridgers album to me always evoked an instant image of teenage serial killers and that one movie Super Dark Times (2017, consequently the same year Stranger in the Alps was released) with an accompanying commentary on romance by a modern-day Brontë sister.
Her third studio album is a work that we can safely say is a defining expression of musicianship as a vessel for grief and profound catharsis.
The opening salvo of the album "The Outside" is a misleading tone-setter for the record since it's more of a robotic Elliot Smith, Star Trek crossover that would usually mean a more experimental, ambient approach. Though flip-flops into a lush and dreamy ballad and back to the secretive vocoder soliloquy.
This record is also said to be largely about the death of Bridgers' father in December 2022, with whom she had a genuinely difficult relationship, tangled up in absenteeism and substance abuse. She previously wrote about him in her deceivingly cheerful indie-pop hit "Kyoto," from Punisher.
I'm pretty sure by now, you've heard of the album's lead single "Lost Boys," which is as anthemic as it sounds.
It's almost among the most revealing tracks from the singer as she illustrates what it's like dating men who never grew up, tracing it back to seeing her own father as a Peter Pan-type who stayed a kid his whole life.
Bridgers also employs the help of a superstar cast of songwriters that range from indie sphere royalty to new school kings such as Alex G and Cameron Winter of Geese. The lineup also includes the prolific Jack Antonoff, Blake Mills, her idol-turned buddy Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes, and the comedic savant Bo Burnham himself, whom she's dating.
Despite this overwhelming creative firepower, the record still comes together as an intentionally understated LP, to the point of being muted for one of the happiest love records and one of the saddest grief records simultaneously.
"Kill Me" is the solemn Bo Burnham tie-up that also sees Winter providing backup vocals against a backdrop of pedal steel that we see throughout the album as a callback to her time listening to country music in her youth.
Among our favourite cuts of this is "Bobby," which is where the shoegaze sheen floats in and is also Bo Burnham's, or Robert Pickering's, pet name for her. With the modular synth, fuzzy guitars, and Bridgers belting about how much she loved and adored him during their time together. If I were to let someone listen to one song on this album, this one would be on top of that list.
It's kind of surreal hearing Bridgers head over heels and sweet over a boy on a record against her catalog filled with tragic unrequited love with murderous intent.
"Liberty Tree" is like a comedown from the explosive and meteoric "Bobby" with folk instrumentation and another helping of domestic gratitude she's never let herself openly sing about before.
Next we mosey along to the material about her late father.
The title track arrives next as the record's most direct reckoning with the wreckage, opening on a synth panorama before it splits open into something closer to a black hole, a sample of Paul Lansky's "Notjustmoreidechatter" cracking through like the whole thing briefly loses signal. It's the closest Bridgers gets to naming what she and her father never resolved, and the John Lennon lost weekend she's borrowing her album title from starts to make a different kind of sense here, less a wild period and more a stretch of time you never fully account for.
"Haunted" pulls the record back into Americana territory, pedal steel and harmonica doing the heavy lifting with Baker and Dacus back on backing vocals, and it plays as a direct callback to the ghost imagery she's been running since Stranger in the Alps, except this time the ghost has an actual name she still won't say out loud. "Still Standing" and "Never Going Back!" keep circling the same wound, the latter tucking in what's reportedly an actual voicemail from her father, 56 seconds and gone before you've had time to brace for it, which might be the most gutting sequencing choice on the whole album.
"I Can't Wait" sets up the finale as the hopeful half of a matched pair, Conor Oberst on harmonica and Cameron Winter back on vocals.
Closing out this emotional rollercoaster is "As Above," which is another major crescendo that is very reminiscent of "I Know the End" and is a boisterous, primal scream into the abyss. "As Above" stacks pianos and synths on top of each other into a church organ suitable for an apocalyptic funeral.
Then there is a short reprise that closes out the track's loop properly, complete with a still humming organ carrying her voice a lot like one of her most eerie and haunting tracks, "Smoke Signals," from her debut LP, tucking into the apocalyptic dread of a closer that is "I Know the End."
