If there’s anything Phoebe Bridgers knows how to do, it’s land a punch line. There are a lot of them in “Lost Weekend,” her first solo record in six years, and she doesn’t waste any time in getting to the first of the album’s many great jokes. Possibly the most quotable couplet comes right in the opening lines of the opening number, “The Outside,” which has Bridgers wryly and ruefully singing through a vocoder that she is “crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy.” Quickly it becomes apparent the “other guy” is her late father, laid out in his coffin. If that cold open leaves you unsure whether to LOL or brace for tears, welcome to the world of “Lost Weekend,” where a little bit of gallows humor is never far off, and neither are surprising heaps of heart-on-sleeve emotion.
“Lost Weekend” is expressly dedicated to her dad, who continues to comes up for discussion in the album quite a bit. But there is another guy besides “the other guy.” The songs also repeatedly reference a still upstanding character named “Bobby,” whom the listener can clearly understand, from copious clues, to be Bo Burnham, her significant other of a few years. The result of Bridgers reflecting so much on her relationships with these two men is an album that has one foot in the grave and one firmly planted on Lovers’ Lane. Flitting between deadpan sorrow and impassioned romance, Bridgers’ album is alternately spooky, hilarious, mysterious and sneakily moving. Maybe it goes without saying: it’s not to be missed.
