David Crosby Is Probably Rolling Over in His Grave at Phoebe Bridgers' New Album. That's a Good Thing.
- Josh Kitchen
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
By : Josh Kitchen / August 7, 2026
There's a moment toward the beginning of Phoebe Bridgers' new album Lost Weekend, where, after slowly reemerging from the proverbial Hobbit-hole she's been living in for the past few years, an ominous yet itchingly familiar male voice begins droning after a truly epic, Christopher Nolan The Odyssey-decibal level bass drop, followed by a fleeting guitar solo—a micro-epic of pent-up fury, cut short before it can fatally melt your face off. The voice is none other than Geese's Cameron Winter [credited here under the pseudonym Son-John Johnson.] It's a perfect microcosm of where Phoebe Bridgers finds herself on her first solo album in six years: finally coming up for air, and she has a whole lot to exhale about.
I compare her absence since Punisher to a cozy stay in a Hobbit-hole because as J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, a Hobbit-hole is "not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." So while she largely stepped away from releasing solo music, she didn't disappear from music altogether, but stepping away from solo records while living the rest of her life.it living her life until she had something worth sharing again, and as evidenced in the video for "Lost Boys," the Tolkien comparison feels especially apt.
Far from dropping Punisher at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and falling off the face of the earth, Bridgers kept herself busy in the years between, reuniting with her best friends Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker as boygenius for their debut full-length, the record, which earned Bridgers four Grammy Awards in 2024. Apart from music, she did a whole lot of living, falling in and out of love. I don't like sounding like a gossip hound, but it's relevant to this record. And like so many of us who've grown well beyond our years during the first half of the 2020s, she experienced profound loss. Her father passed away in 2023, and their complicated relationship—first explored on Punisher's "Kyoto"—becomes one of the emotional centers of Lost Weekend.
Combine all of that with one of the strangest rises to fame in modern music, and you start to get at the heart of this record. How many artists become household names during a global pandemic, let alone for almost entirely good reasons? Plenty of young musicians get saddled with some variation of the "voice of a generation" label. If that was daunting for Bob Dylan in 1964, imagine carrying it in the age of social media. Then imagine having cantankerous hippie legend David Crosby publicly call you pathetic for smashing a guitar on Saturday Night Live. Lost Weekend often feels like Bridgers finishing the argument Crosby started. The woman he dismissed for smashing that guitar in front of millions of people has now made an album that repeatedly toys with rock excess, teasing colossal guitar solos, deafening bass drops, and moments of real catharsis, only to withhold them at the last second. God forbid a girl crank up the rock and roll.
On Lost Weekend, Bridgers takes all of those experiences—the grief, the love, the superstardom, the impossible expectations—and turns them into an album that attempts (and largely succeeds) in reckoning with each of them. "Kill Me," the Cameron Winter collaboration mentioned above, is an early example. It's a sick joke that she ends the song with what sounds like it's about to become the most incredible face-melting guitar solo you've ever heard, only to cut it off before giving you the pleasure. Crosby be damned. Throughout Lost Weekend, Bridgers becomes an emotional guitar hero, wielding that power across a lengthy album filled with soft moments of rage and towering crescendos, while never abandoning the bare-bones indie-folk songwriting she perfected on Stranger in the Alps.
The lead up to her romance ending with actor Paul Mescal is detailed in "The Governor's Waltz," the governor here referring to New York's Governors Ball festival. "I was the belle of the Governor's Ball, hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall," she sings before seemingly referencing her meeting Gracie Abrams, who now dates Mescal. It's a biting song—a wake for a love that was cut down before it could fully blossom.
But the track that follows, "Bobby," is a glorious and playful love song about comedian Bo Burnham (whose real name is Robert). "I saw you slow dancing alone in your room, I wanted to buy you a new pair of shoes, now you're walking around with your heart on your sleeve, I am right here bleeding," she sings over a familiar shimmering guitar line filled with banjo, huge drums, classic Bridgers screams, all of that pent-up energy finally releasing. It might be Phoebe Bridgers' happiest song, an artist in the throes of love realizing "this could be the end," repeating the phrase as though wondering if, for once, the end might actually mean for keeps. It feels good hearing Bridgers so happy. We get a glimpse of it earlier on the album's lead single, "Lost Boys," which includes maybe the most pure and thrilling "YEAHHH" in recent rock and roll memory.
On "Never Going Back!" she teases us into thinking we're about to get a fun little stomper, its title cheekily recalling Fleetwood Mac's "Never Going Back Again," before the song fades into a voicemail from her late father: "Hey Phoebe its your dad, I know you're busy being a rock star and that takes up a lot of your time, [he chuckles] anyway give me a call when you get a chance, love you." The song ends over the same gentle banjo strum—a musical goodbye to a parent. It's Bridgers' answer to Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle," except from the child's perspective: wishing things had been different, or lamenting that maybe they never could have been. It's the emotional core of an album by an artist who excels at making us feel exactly what she feels, because, ultimately, they're the same feelings so many of us have dealt with in the first half of the 2020's.
"It's all gonna be alright, we'll make it through, you know me, and I'll never forgive you for that," Bridgers sings on the title track, a droning prayer that dissolves into an electronic collage of memory and dreams. That sentiment echoes on the album's closer, "Lost Weekend (Reprise)," where she once again sings about her late father. "He never made it a day in a shirt, he's not coming back as a bird, he's not coming back. But I still live by the things he taught me, like how to forgive when they're not sorry, and the government isn't trying to kill you, they just don't care if they kill you." So much is learned about her relationship with her father in these lines, and how even when our parents aren't perfect, there is still so much they can teach us. Instead of the build up in the first version of the track, the reprise fades out with her gently crooning, wishing she didn't take the lost weekend for granted.
On Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers makes it clear that growing up is not about learning to let go, but learning to carry people with you after they're gone - and never taking for granted the people who make life worth living while they're here. Six years after Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers hasn't returned after a hiatus. She's returned after living a life.
