While it has been six years since Phoebe Bridgers released Punisher, her excellent second album, she’s hardly been resting on her laurels. In 2023, she and her co-conspirators Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus followed up their 2018 EP as Boygenius with The Record, a full-length album. Not only did it combine all their talents into something greater than any of their solo albums, but it was enormously successful, catapulting all of them to further prominence, including gigs at arenas like Madison Square Garden. I fell head over heels for Boygenius as much for its songs as its sound, which I called “a canny combination of stripped-down home-studio productions and old-school major-label record-making.” It became the first album by any of the three to land on my Top 25.
After all that excitement died down, Bridgers took some time for herself before going to work on her third album, which she introduced with an incredibly skillful and heartfelt marketing campaign, playing phone-free shows in odd venues in a quirky tour that culminated in a two-night stand back at MSG with tickets as low as a dollar (if you won the lottery first…sadly, I did not). She also turned her back on the “waterfall” release schedule, putting out only one single in advance. Lost Boys, which featured both Byrne and Dacus, was a perfect bridge from Boygenius with an indelible chorus and resonant lyrics. Bridgers seemed to acknowledge its status as an instant classic herself when she played it twice during a TV appearance, once with a band of high-energy teens and again with an acoustic ensemble of old folkies.
Could any album live up to that? I’m happy to say that Lost Weekend (Dead Oceans) not only fulfills the promise of Lost Boys, but is easily the finest album Bridgers has released. It will remain to be seen if it edges out The Record in my affections, but it’s also different enough that that question is probably immaterial. Lost Weekend is pop music as fine art, leveraging the techniques and talents of dozens of people from across the musical map to arrive at something that feels both epic and highly personal. Bridgers proves herself a collaborative genius, co-writing almost every song with other established songwriters including Damien Jurado, Christian Lee Hutson, Maya Hawk, and Alex G, without ever sounding like anyone but herself. Great composers and arrangers like Rob Moose and Caroline Shaw are here too, along with multiple producers, including Jack Antonoff, who usually makes me wince, but here plays multiple instruments and helps craft a sound that is dynamic, lush, and full of variety while sounding very much of a piece.
In fact, my first impression of the album is that it was a modern song cycle, so carefully does each song build on the last. I almost couldn’t pick one to focus on, but after a few listens, I chose I Can’t Wait, which is the second single from the album and features one of two cameos from Geese’s Cameron Winter, which is as good a reason to highlight it as any. Built on a low-end throb created by Bridgers and Antonoff on bass guitars, the song starts in a state of suspension and slowly builds to a restrained crescendo driven by Marshall Vore’s drums. A new section emerges from Conor Oberst’s wheezing harmonica, Greg Leisz’s sparkling pedal steel, and a bed of acoustic bass and guitars of all types. This is where Winter joins Bridgers, his wayward tenor combining with Bridgers’ gleaming voice in deeply moving fashion, almost as if he’s the imperfection she can’t permit herself to admit out loud.
The song returns to its suspended stage, and builds up again, with CJ Camerieri’s brass taking it to new heights before an abrupt ending. The lyrics, opening with the plaintive lines “Baby, baby, if you leave me/Can you take me with you?” details the narrator’s disbelief that her relationship is ending. As she tries to rebuild her identity as a single person (“Not so slowly getting older/California sober…” she seems to come to the realization that by embracing her own contradictions more fully maybe she can be more available to another person.
This is where the brilliance of having Winter join her on the track becomes fully clear, as they sing together:
All my life
Side by side
Hyde Jekyll Hyde
Finally together
You can change your mind
But you can't change mine
Hyde Jekyll Hyde
You and I forever
Lost Weekend is end-to-end great, with each song revealing more facets after every listen. Why not start now?
Listen to most of the songs for Friday here or below.
Other Recent Releases
L’Rain - fata morgana (Mexican Summer) According to me, I Killed Your Dog, Taja Cheek’s last album as L’Rain, was “a seamless, complex, and often very funny take on modern pop, rock, and R&B.” While those elements are still present here, along with electronics, hip-hop, and reggae, the blend is even more seamless and masterful. While there are moments when she highlights a particular sonic signature, like the dancehall coda that ends July 5th or the pitch-perfect modern R&B of birthday (Kelela watch your back), the album represents genre fluidity at its best.
Nina Winder-Lind - Wild Love (Transgressive) Until the other three-quarters of The New Eves (Violet Farrer, Kate Mager, and Ella Oona Russell) release their solo albums, it will be hard to figure out who brings what to the table. But one thing is for certain: Winder-Lind’s songwriting and distinctive voice (at times full of yelps and quavers, at others declamatory like a female Lou Reed from Brighton, England via Sweden) can more than sustain an album on their own. While Russell’s flute is heard on the album, overall the album sounds more straightforward than The New Eves. Lyrically, however, Winder-Lind is still bucking convention and searching for freedom in her creative work and relationships. Whether in the simplistic keyboards of HYMN or the guitar firepower of Foremothers, which closes the album in a blaze of glory, it sounds like she’s found it.
Sunna Corona - Demigold (Self-Released) The press release for this debut album confused me by describing it as “the solo project of Los Angeles-based musician and Hurt Valley drummer Jesse McIntosh.” This sent me off on a tangent, listening to Glacial Pace, the one and only Hurt Valley album from 2019 (which I liked then and now), and searching for evidence that McIntosh collaborated with Brian Collins, who I’ve always understood to be the only member of Hurt Valley. Perhaps McIntosh was in the live band? I did find a credit for McIntosh from when he worked with ex-Walkman bassist/organist Peter Matthew Bauer, which is all the cred anyone would need. But the fact is, none of it matters, because this is a very fine collection of indie-folk featuring McIntosh’s warm voice in a variety of settings. The opening track has a bit of the quietly anthemic vibe that The Velvet Underground perfected on Loaded, with layers of guitars playing an ascending melody that could repeat forever. No Bravado features drummer Jamie Douglass and includes prominent percussion and piano alongside a nearly Baroque guitar arrangement. The title track ups the tempo and adds even more searing guitar, in yet another example of McIntosh’s versatility. Whoever else he’s worked with, McIntosh knows what he’s doing.
Mesh - No Fun At All (Feel It) Even if the songs weren’t any good, musicians from the realms of indie rock and post-punk would be taking notes on this Philly band’s debut LP just for the sheer sound of it. Tom Riese’s bass is rubbery and slightly serrated, while Steve Darling’s drums are dry and tell more than they show. Alison Durham’s 12-string electric guitar (so often the province of Byrds’n’Beatles revivalists) slashes, sparkles, clangs, and grates, supported by Sims Hardin’s six-string strumming. And when it comes to the vocals, Hardin’s wry bark is perfectly complemented by Durham’s clear soprano. But the songs are SO GOOD! The band does not miss, right from the fanfare-like chord sequence of To Hold On To, which opens the album, all the way through Quit My Job, which is a very 2026 song about, you guessed it, quitting your job, and in celebratory fashion, too. Let’s hope Mesh never quits this job.
Lee Noble - No Becoming (Sweat Lodge Guru, 2011/Primordial Void) When someone makes music as cool as Marcel Sletten does, it makes sense to be interested in what interests him. That definitely pays off here, with the first vinyl release from Sletten’s label being a reissue of an album I wish I’d heard 15 years ago. However, starting with the tape swipe and clangorous piano that introduce Cop Show, the opening track, this collection of cinematic, mostly electronic music has a timeless feel. Each track is concise and moves with purpose. Paradise Life, for example, is a warm yet unsettling bath of distorted keyboards and half-heard voices, while Fantasy Hair makes the most of a two-chord sequence, adding loose drums, blistering howls, and all sorts of other noises that make perfect sense in context. By the time you get to the fourth track, Emotive Cloak, a space-hymn for drum machine and synths, you will be fully immersed. While the 200-run vinyl pressing is certainly an object of desire, keep in mind that you will have to stir yourself from your reverie to flip the disc and hear the rest of Noble’s triumph. Reissue of the year?
Ulrika Spacek - EXPO, REMIXED (Full Time Hobby) The remix renaissance continues as the British art rockers hand off tracks from their excellent fourth album to sonic architects such as Gloorp, More Eaze, and Fantasy Of A Broken Heart with captivating results. Whether dismantling songs entirely or deepening their grooves, each new version shines new light on the inner workings of the recordings.
Beltline Bones - Technological Eclipse (New Focus) If the idea of a trombone quartet makes you flash back to that time someone made you eat your vegetables, you can be reassured that this Madison, Wisconsin group tastes great. For one thing, the recording, by Cole Bartels, is gorgeous, juicy, and dimensional. For another, Bartels and his fellow trombonists Justin Coyne, Zach Bethel, and Adam Nissenbaum are not shy about adding extended techniques, voice, violin, and fixed media to expand the soundscape, as several of the composers they work with do. Humor is also a leavening agent, as in Bartels’ own brief piece, Stella Eats Her Breakfast, which samples his cat. But there is never a dull moment here, whether in Jorge Variego’s Ocho, which opens the album by doubling the quartet with jazzy vocal harmonies, or Alec Love’s title track, which closes the album in an apotheosis of sampled heavy metal guitars, AI promotional voices, and commanding chorales. In between, you get two pieces by Eva Beglarian, including Wet Psalm, which features Linda Norton’s poem based on a soaked bible she found in New Orleans, and Bartels’ arrangement of Brooks Frederickson’s surprisingly moving I was thinking about the buffalo, originally for string quartet and inspired by Captain Kirk’s last line in Star Trek: The Original Series. These Bones are full of surprises!
Note: The graphic above is based on a photo by Todd Owyoung.
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