Five Stars, and Nobody's Heard It
The reviews landed before the record did. Phoebe Bridgers' first solo album in six years does not reach streaming until Friday, August 14, but the verdict has been public since last Wednesday, August 5, when The Guardian ran five stars. Dork ran five. The Forty-Five ran five. Metacritic now reads 91, filed under universal acclaim, which makes Lost Weekend one of the best reviewed records of the year and also a record almost nobody outside the press has heard end to end. Sixteen tracks, 52 minutes and 26 seconds, four producers, out on Dead Oceans. If you have been waiting since Punisher, you have four days left and a wall of five-star copy to read in the meantime. It is worth asking what that wall is actually telling you.
The number is not the news
The 91 hides something useful: Punisher scored 90. Her last solo album was filed under universal acclaim too, six years ago, and the new one clears it by a single point. That is not evidence of a leap. It is evidence that critics have been consistent about her for a very long time, which is a quieter claim.
The spread is where the information is. Across the ten reviews aggregated at Album of the Year, nothing sits below 80. The Guardian, Dork, The Forty-Five and Rolling Stone UK are all at the ceiling. DIY, Uncut and Mojo are all at the floor. And the reviews at the floor are not arguing that the album is weak. They are arguing about how much work it asks of you. DIY calls it "a dense, introspective opus as complex and unpredictable as its author." Slant, at 90, calls it "a rigorously crafted memorandum charting a period of dissociation." Consequence, which graded it A minus and plainly loves it, still lands the sharpest reservation in the pile: the melodies, it says, "can't quite match the ambition of the lyrics."
Nobody in that group is calling it easy. Several of them are calling it long.
Two reviews arrive independently at the same reading of what the record is doing. Consequence opens with it: "On Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers is seeing double. Two men, one living and one dead." On its account the album sets grief on one side, her father's death, worked through on "Still Standing," "Haunted" and the closing reprise, against a run of songs co-written with Bo Burnham, whom Consequence credits on seven of the sixteen. The Forty-Five, giving it five, reaches for the same pairing: "If love and grief are two of the strongest human emotions, then this is an album that stitches them together with invisible thread."
That is a heavy brief to meet cold at midnight on a Friday. Which is the argument for not meeting it cold.
The strangest release week of the year
From Monday, August 10 through Friday, August 14, thirty-four planetaria across Europe, North America and Oceania are running ticketed previews of the album, either as a dome show designed by Babak Tafreshi or as a laser show. On Thursday, August 13, more than 300 locations are hosting listening parties. Until the record actually arrives, those rooms are the only place to hear it, which means a lot of committed fans will meet Lost Weekend under a fake sky next to strangers rather than alone with headphones.
Call it a stunt if you like. It still suits the record better than the alternative. Something this long rewards one uninterrupted sitting with nowhere to scroll, and Bridgers has been consistent on the point: the pop-up shows she played across the US in May and June were phone-free, and The Lost Tour, which runs September to December with Alex G and Isaac Wood opening, is a phone-free arena tour.
Start somewhere else
If you have never heard her, start with Punisher, not the new one. It is 40 minutes and 11 tracks against 52 minutes and 16, it puts "Kyoto" near the front and "I Know the End" at the back, and it is the album everyone else means when they talk about her. If Punisher does not land, Lost Weekend will not either, and you will have spent an extra twelve minutes finding that out.
If you only know her from boygenius, skip Punisher for now and go to Stranger in the Alps. What boygenius does on the record is braid three writers together, and it is very good at disguising which lines are hers. Her 2017 debut is the same writer with nobody to hand the line to, and to my ear it is the closest thing in her catalogue to what Dork calls the new one, "a deliciously strange record." The boygenius thread is not cut either: Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus both sing on "Lost Boys," alongside Alex G, Caroline Shaw and Chris Thile.
And if you play one thing off the new record on Friday, make it "Bobby." "Lost Boys" has been out since June 25 and has already had its ceremony. "Bobby" is the track both Consequence and The Forty-Five stop on: Consequence hears in it "a cycle broken", The Forty-Five hears a relationship "that serves as a saviour". Start there, let it run to "Lost Weekend (reprise)," and leave your phone in another room. Or find a planetarium ticket before Friday and skip the queue entirely.
