~

In a way, Warne died as he lived: unapologetically, without fear or shame, leaving a hurricane of emotions and happy memories trailing in his wake. Indeed, one of the more comforting aspects of the grieving process has been the opportunity to relive and reflect upon the immense pleasure he provided us over the last 30 years, not for selfish or pecuniary reasons but because pleasure – both the taking and the giving – simply flowed through him like blood, was indeed the entire point of the exercise.

The Guardian, 2022

Shane Warne was immortal, and he died. “Of a heart attack at the age of 52 in his luxury Koh Samui villa,” sportswriter Jonathan Liew clarifies, “in the grand scheme of things… a bleakly perfect way to go: the Youngman’s Death that Roger McGough so heartily endorsed.”

That’s the closest I have come to understanding why his death continues to hit me harder than any other death in the public domain, indeed why it has rattled me like few other events in my lucky life. Warne was inevitable in much the same way Donald Trump is inevitable. Surely, surely, he could never die? Warne’s life was an endless conferral of the faith that he really could will into existence anything he wanted—a wicket, a fan, a friend—and I solemnly believe that that if it were a bullet speeding towards Warne instead, he would have turned his head at the right time too. The president claimed he was saved by God to make his country great again; I guess Warnie already did that.

Shane Warne got a state funeral—as far as an event held at the MCG and observed by a billion people can be called a ‘state’ funeral—not a public holiday in his honour. It was March of twenty-twenty-two: inflation was 5.1 per cent; the cash rate was 0.1 per cent. Even if the public were duly in mourning, a holiday was off the table. But over the years, I would guess I have given myself a day’s equivalent to quietly grieve: sitting at my desk, letting my eyes go glassy at work as I re-read the best of the tsunami of eulogies that arrived in the aftermath of his Koh Samui Heart Attack. The memory of Warne’s death has a strangely withering effect on me, and I feel the urge to revisit it frequently.

Liew’s reflection is my favourite: a bracing, hilarious, deeply reasonable attempt to summon the fundamental lesson of Shane Warne’s impossible life. His answer is beautiful and soothing.

Did it feel good? If not, then what was the point of it?

I thought of Shane Warne, and I thought of this mantra, when I first listened to Lost Weekend, the third solo album from Los Angeles singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. It occurred to me that perhaps the impulse that periodically compels me to revel in the shock and legend of Warne’s death is the same one that has always drawn me to Bridgers’ quietly combative folk music. One thing that unexpectedly binds the respective artistry of Warne and Bridgers is a reluctance to apologise, an indifference to compromise. Warne was, by all accounts, a beautiful soul, but his trade both on and off the pitch was defined by a lack of contrition—you don’t take 700 Test wickets without drawing a borderline sadistic pleasure from the creation of minor heartbreak.

And, certainly, there are artists who have written sadder music than Phoebe Bridgers, though perhaps none have quite so definitively leant into the catharsis of wallowing as the Pasadena phenomenon. The enduring influence of Bridgers’ 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, on post-algorithm guitar music stems from her unique sensitivity as a songwriter to disorientation and contrast—magnifying passing interactions into entire worlds for songs to live in, enunciating the overwhelming emotion brought on by the ordinary vicissitudes of life, while in the same breath exposing the banality of the violence we routinely inflict upon one another. What Bridgers understood earlier and better than any of her contemporaries was how context could be manipulated to amplify the intensity and expand the territory of what canmake you feel sorry for yourself. She also, crucially, laced her songwriting with self-effacing humour and endearing frankness.

Turns out, wallowing is a surprisingly hedonistic activity. Not to suggest that the pandemic didn’t give eight billion people a good reason to be a little more depressed than usual, but Bridgers’ explosion in popularity and cultural significance since the release of 2020’s Punisher points to the possibility that there is something perversely pleasurable about indulging in your own sadness (Karly Hartzman has the final word on this matter).

One reading of Lost Weekend, then, is that it is an expertly-crafted artefact of fan service, designed to feel good in the way a Phoebe Bridgers album is supposed to feel good. I think it sounds quite a lot like Punisher—not everyone does, but, then again, I’ve listened to Punisher more than most. The two albums share a distinct musical and lyrical palette: deep, resonant baritone and acoustic guitars intentionally suffocated by hallucinatory synthesisers and Mellotron; ghostly slathers of vocoder over Bridgers’ piercing, airy vocals; theatrical key changes and emphasis on leitmotif; relentlessly introspective lyrics as disarming as they are confrontational. And it is sad, in an irreconcilable way, a way that permits wallowing because it does not shine a light on the emergency exit to Bridgers’ angst. This quality stems naturally from the fact that the record’s central conceit, the recent death of Bridgers’ father, is itself a dissolution rather than a fracture.

Lost Weekend suggests Bridgers is motivated by a philosophy of kaizen—continuous refinement—more than transformation. Her vantage as a songwriter is the same as it has always been: the protagonist and the imposter, both at once. Previous triumphs like ‘Kyoto’ alluded to this perspective more subtly; on this album’s opener, ‘The Outside’, she spells it out: “Screaming my ending, fist in the air / you were there / but I was on the outside, watching”. The album is also lousy with classic Bridgers-isms—acutely funny, brutally honest one-liners that slice through a disorienting passage of stream-of-consciousness narration—the effects of which can be separately invigorating and flattening. Like when Bridgers, having initially undersold her hand, bragging of sedatives only as strong as “a couple ibuprofen”, sparks the country two-stepper ‘Haunted’ into life with deft humour, insisting, “I have no secrets, only feelings, and I know those go away / there is a difference between lying and deciding what not to say”. Or when, on the stunning reprise of the song ‘Lost Weekend’ that closes the album, she sings, “I am my old man’s oldest son / I fought the wall, and the wall won”, a conclusion so brusque and final that it has the effect of a vacuum seal, viciously sucking up whatever breathing space the record had left to exhaust.

Which is also to say, when Lost Weekend is good, it is really, really good. If you have listened to enough of Phoebe Bridgers’ music, as I absolutely have, you will be aware that she has surprisingly powerhouse vocal chops, usually raising her voice to little more than a whisper but fully capable of hitting ballistic high notes that soar above the song and seem to last forever and ever. And if you have watched enough YouTube videos of Bridgers performing, as I also have, you may have picked up on (trust me I’m trying not to be weird about this) how the corners of her mouth often curl into a smile right before she lets the endless note go, out of what I can only assume is the sudden recognition of her transcendence. And there is a moment on the song ‘Bobby’ when you can hear this happen: “and if you didn’t like even one of my friends”, Bridgers sings, “I’d kill them, I’d kill them”—that second one exhaled with all the euphoria and hyperbole of a crush that defies rationality.

It is a gorgeous, compulsive song. ‘Bobby’ stands out as one of the best love songs in a year where the quotidian has never been more romantic. “Now I sleep in your shirts, and you live in my house / you sing in the shower, I talk to myself”, Bridgers purrs above rousing campfire guitar and crashing cymbals, swooning over the notion of love as a daily habit: “We’ve got stars on the ceiling, and clothes on the floor / and a thing in a box I don’t touch anymore”. If it’s not abundantly clear what Bridgers is inferring here, the alternate lyric that appears on the physical edition of Lost Weekend leaves nothing to the imagination.

There is, however, a small, pervasive sense of too many cooks in the kitchen haunting Lost Weekend. The album’s credit list is eye-watering, at least five producers contributing to each song—notably including Jack Antonoff and Alex G—and a revolving door of indie rock luminaries pitching in with instrumental or vocal assistance, including but not limited to: longtime Bridgers collaborator Conor Oberst, American Football’s Mike Kinsella, Bridgers’ own beau Bo Burnham, Stranger Thing Maya Hawke, fellow geniuses Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, Kanye-whisperer Jon Brion, the list truly goes on. At times, it can be a little much. The album has a penchant for songs that struggle to connect at first, leaning on electronics that sound stifling and purgatorial, until abruptly falling into fresh, oxygenated Americana.

The point being, I suppose, that eventually the music does find its way to beauty. ‘I Can’t Wait’—at first a dead ringer for the Punisher deep cut ‘ICU’—persists with eerie sinewaves and nagging-if-not-totally-satisfying percussion for a minute or so until an onrush of bluegrass cleanses the song like a deep inhale of clean Pacific Northwestern air. It is at this point that Bridgers reveals the ace up her sleeve—the Kermit warble of Cameron Winter, in sparkling duet with Bridgers on the song’s bridge—a production choice so utilitarian and pleasurable that it would almost read as cynical, were it not such a fleeting, weightless album highlight.

Did it feel good?  You could make the argument that nothing is more comforting to a post-pandemic audience than familiarity, and, truthfully, Lost Weekend is a bit of a harbinger for déjà vu. Not only can you recognise the contours of a Punisher song at the beginning of ‘I Can’t Wait’, the second half of the song adopts the distinct timbre of ‘Graceland Too’ from the same album. The brassy fanfare of lead single ‘Lost Boys’ isn’t that far off ‘Kyoto’, either. The album’s strangest moment comes in the form of an alien whistle that interrupts ‘Liberty Tree’, right as the energy of the song is cresting, that, I swear to God, sounds uncannily similar to the final transmission of genuine weirdness in Kanye West’s career: ‘Wolves’. The skipping cadence and minor-key melody of ‘As Above’ reminds me of a lesser-known song by Charlie Hickey, a childhood friend of Bridgers’, called ‘Notre Dame’. Perhaps most garishly, once ‘Still Standing’—one of the most emotionally desolate songs Bridgers has ever written—kicks into its 3/4 jaunt, it suddenly bears more than a little resemblance to Gracie Abrams’ ‘I Love You, I’m Sorry’. I suspect most readers who have made it this far into this grotesquely long review will understand why that’s so jarring.

~

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word.

Goodbye To All That, 1967

Yes, I have chosen to quote Joan Didion in a Phoebe Bridgers album review. Sorry. I am aware of how annoying that is. Yes, I first decided to read Didion because of a Phoebe Bridgers interview. Sorry. I promise I’m not the only one.

I really did think about that passage when I first listened to Lost Weekend, though I’m more or less constantly lolling that passage around in my mouth, hearing the words ring around in my head, forever a little haunted by it. See—confirmation bias or not—I don’t actually think Lost Weekend is about grief, or comfort, or any theme so universal. I think the album is in service of something much more personal to Bridgers, something more unsettling and more meaningless at the same time, something so impulsive and human that, really, the only authority you can invoke on the subject is Didion.

You can trace the origins of Phoebe Bridgers’ ascent into indie superstardom (and pop middledom) back to a point of singularity—five minutes and nine seconds into the song ‘I Know The End’, the climactic denouement to her stratospheric album Punisher, Bridgers lets out a vocal-cord shredding scream that became, for a specific cohort of music fans, the defining cultural relic of the pandemic. It was a scream that rippled, if not quite through the ages, its way to three-hundred million streams and counting, a scream that opened up a new cosmos of opportunity and attention ahead of Bridgers that she surely could not have foreseen at the time of recording. 

She smashed a guitar on SNL in the echo of that scream. The scream toured endlessly once the world opened up, took her out of stuffy bandrooms and into cavernous arenas, booked her a spot on the Eras Tour, where the scream showed up on seismometers. The scream landed her a SZA co-sign. The scream bought her, and her boygenius bandmates, a major label contract and a record so dominant in the year 2023 that the scream became, briefly, a bit insufferable to observe. Not long later, Bridgers disappeared from the public eye; the obsession leased by ‘I Know The End’ threatened to swallow her whole. When you search for “i know the end” on Google, the first entry that pops up is the song’s Genius lyric sheet, which reads: “‘I Know The End’ is the metalinguistic closing track of Phoebe’s sophomore album Punisher”. Metalinguistic. I had to look up what that word means. Perhaps it’s time to start restricting wiki edit privileges for music stans.

This context is instructive, because Bridgers subtly invokes the song a number of times across her new record. The candlelit ballad ‘Kill Me’ sounds so spare that it provokes Bridgers to confess, “I was once certain, always / now all I know is the ending”. In between doe-eyed snapshots of a new infatuation, ‘Bobby’ finds Bridgers muttering to herself, “this could be the end”. “I was going to show you colours you had never seen”, Bridgers laments on the devastating ‘Other Plans’, in oblique allusion to her off-handed promise, from ‘I Know The End’, to “let the ultraviolet cover me up”. It is no coincidence that Phoebe keeps the ghost of the song that ignited her career within haunting distance of her latest creation. Lost Weekend, in spite of its title, is not about losing anything. It is an album about getting everything you ever wanted. It is an album about cultivating your own mythology and living with the consequences, however corrosive they turn out to be.

What distinguishes Lost Weekend from Phoebe Bridgers’ two previous solo albums—indeed any album she has been a part of—is how deftly and actively it manages her own lore. In 2026, most listeners who are choosing to press play on a new Phoebe Bridgers album are well aware of, and probably emotionally invested in, the finer details of Bridgers’ personal life. Bridgers starred alongside Irish heartthrob Paul Mescal in the music video for the Punisher song ‘Savior Complex’ during the twilight of the pandemic, and the love affair that ensued was so heady and intense that not even two years later they had already weathered an engagement and subsequent separation. Both have since re-partnered—as at the time of writing, Bridgers is in a relationship with the aforementioned Burnham, and Mescal with the singer-songwriter and faithful Bridgers acolyte Gracie Abrams.

‘The Governor’s Waltz’ chronicles these developments in sufficient detail to service the TikTok tabloids—in the song’s final verse, Bridgers playfully broadsides both Mescal’s habit for running away from his Hinge dates and Abrams’ conspicuous imitation of her sound—but, more significantly, offers a cautionary tale about the fears that success cannot insulate you from. “I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball”, Bridgers announces—a slightly gauche way to open the song—“hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall”. But the seemingly high stakes are a kind of Trojan horse for Bridgers to examine a more muted, domestic sense of unease. ‘The Governor’s Waltz’ clearly references Bridgers’ relationship with Mescal—specifically the crevasse between their star-crossed public image and the private isolation that, in the end, they couldn’t quite shake: “Let’s see how long we can go without talking / watch me pretending to sleep”. The song itself is only partially effective—it is produced within an inch of its life yet comes away sounding a little aimless—but it succeeds in communicating the churning loneliness that Bridgers endured at the height of her powers.

When ruminating on the fallout from her rapid onset come-up, Bridgers oscillates between twin impulses for vulnerability and self-deprecation. The spritely, dreamlike lead single ‘Lost Boys’ tumbles between scenes and settings at such an unexplained, filmic pace that it emulates the feeling of displacement that animates the song, Bridgers confessing, “this machine is killing me / I pretended it was make believe”. Yet one of Lost Weekend’s more arresting moments is a simple, plainspoken verse on its titular song that finds Bridgers interrogating the wreckage of her personal life with a blank expression and a wry smile: “I'm supposed to be married, but I called it off / I've been known to throw a tantrum when things are not the way I imagine thеm / I am restoring the natural order, lеarning the same lesson over and over again”. Bridgers says nothing on the song ‘Lost Parade’, but its triumphal horns and crowd cheers articulate the moral of her story with more clarity and morbid humour than words ever could.

Lost Weekend is a fable of pyrrhic victory. It is a beautiful, challenging album about the whirlwind half-decade that followed her scream into the void, and it ends with her marooned in the same position from which she sung ‘I Know The End’: contemplating the apocalypse, on the move, at speed, plagued by implacable feelings of sadness and placelessness. The myth of Phoebe Bridgers has always been supernatural; it is not out of character for her to repeat an occultist refrain on the chorus of the album’s penultimate song, ‘As Above’. But there’s something illuminating about the defiance with which she delivers the song’s climactic message: “You won’t have to believe in magic / leave it to me, and I’ll make it happen”. For the first time on Lost Weekend, Bridgers reaches into a straining upper register, channelling the earnest intensity of an emo singer, imploring you to believe in her ability to make it through, no matter the cost. Really, though, she is pleading with herself, desperate to prove that the end is not the same as the beginning, that the snake need not eat its own tail. 

Much earlier in the album, on the song ‘Kill Me’, Bridgers’ voice briefly intertwines with Cameron Winter’s, as the Geese frontman drolly intones a haunting phrase, ‘تمام شد’—tamàm shud, it is finished. It strikes me that there is something inauspicious about a Californian artist encoding a Persian mantra into an album that, in the span of time between the release of its lead single and its full publication, soundtracked both the conclusion and the recommencement of war between America and Iran. What was that proclamation from earlier? We are so back. I learnt today that if you plug that last sentence into Google Translate, it equates to a Persian saying, ما خیلی برگشتیم. Ma khili aghabim. Which, in reverse, translates to something entirely different. We are far behind.

78

Sam Gollings

24 August 2026