All 16 Tracks of Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Lost Weekend,’ Ranked

“Lost Parade,” the album’s second interlude, is ranked lowest here solely because there isn’t a lot to work with. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, which says a lot about how excellent Lost Weekend is. Here, we hear a crowd cheering to a marching band rendition of “Liberty Tree,” before it fades out into the next track, “As Above.”

“Panorama” has a lot more to offer as an interlude in comparison to “Lost Parade.” It starts off with an instrumental arrangement with twinkling synths, strings, and muddy guitars, over a tom-rich bedroom downtempo beat. True to its title, there’s an earthy quality to the track that’s upended by a few lines in the end, passed through a vocoder that Bridgers uses many times throughout Lost Weekend. “A panorama hotel room / I chose this number for the view,” she sings sluggishly. “If you’re drinking, then I’m drinking.”

Bridgers starts the album with a picture of a funeral. The opening line “Crying in a suit and tie / but you should see the other guy” alludes not just to her father’s death but also to the tumultuous relationship they had. The lyricism here, as on the rest of Lost Weekend, is candid and vivid. While nothing else on the album sounds like “The Outside,” the track just serves as a teaser for the kinds of sounds heard on Lost Weekend, juxtaposing the synthetic textures of a vocoder with an acoustic guitar and a piano.

Running at a minute and 42 seconds, “Never Going Back!” is one of the album’s simpler songs. Here, Bridgers sings a mantra, “Never going back again / the way it used to be is not the way it is,” over guitars and a banjo. But just when you think she’s moved on from heartbreak or trauma, we get a voicemail from her late father, who says “being a rockstar takes up a lot of your time,” betraying a sense of evasiveness hiding beneath the track’s cheerfulness.

One of my favorite things about Lost Weekend is the recurring melodic motif that we hear in the sadder songs, like “Lost Weekend,” its reprise, and “Still Standing.” In this track, the motif is sung in choir-like acapella, which only feels appropriate for a song where Bridgers tries to reconcile grief and anger. She enumerates details of experiences with her father, like quarreling on prom night or a fight between her parents. “I can’t imagine you dead / but you are, every day / Thank you for everything,” she says in the final chorus, before the elegiac motif takes over.

In Lost Weekend, Bridgers reuses a lot of elements to make the album cohesive. “As Above” is one of a few songs here that crescendo into something louder. But unlike “Kill Me” and the title track, this one falls back into haze after its cathartic bridge, where she sings about ironically rendering her anxiety as a god-like superpower: “You won’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me and I’ll make it happen.”

The lyrics in “Other Plans” don’t give away much. “Our love had other plans,” Bridgers sings, but whatever those other plans are are held back by restrained production and writing. There’s beauty in the song’s simultaneous opacity and simplicity, in Bridgers’ singing over a Yamaha CP80 and nothing else. In her radio broadcast Lost Signal, Bridgers said that she wrote the song “very quickly” at the end of making Lost Weekend and decided to include it in the album, and it works well as a break from the intensity and richer production of other tracks.

It’s great to hear a song where Bridgers is just in love, and in “Liberty Tree,” she sings about taking photobooth pictures with Bo Burnham (affectionately referred to as Bobby throughout the album). Its interlude consists of a jubilant and bright acoustic guitar hook. “You were made in the image of God / but you look like your mom in this picture of us,” she sings in the chorus, which she gorgeously ties back to previous work with a melody borrowed from Punisher’s “Graceland Too.”

“Haunted” is one of the happier songs on the album, an upbeat folk cut that almost falls into stomp-clap territory, with strings and steel guitar, but is saved by the euphoric chug of Jack Antonoff’s drums in the second chorus. Boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker contribute backing vocals in this track, where Bridgers sings about seeing her friends again and healing. “You can go or you can stay / I’m gonna put myself together either way,” she says on the bridge.

The final song on the album is the strongest of the ones that touch on grief. In “Still Standing,” Bridgers couldn’t place her anger in the loss, but in “Lost Weekend (Reprise),” she’s resolute and ready to move forward. “But we’re gonna be alright, me and you,” she sings as a one-note organ drones in the background. The album’s melodic motif returns again, hummed this time without a choir behind Bridgers or a vocoder to obscure real human feelings.

The romantic waltzing rhythm of this track is a deceptive outer layer for lyrics that detail the end of a relationship. The line “I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball” dates this story back to 2021, when Bridgers performed at the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York. It’s also the same year she publicly dated actor Paul Mescal, who now dates fellow American singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams. I admit that part of the appeal of the song is the intrigue and subtle shade thrown in lines like “I’m next to you / you’re next to nothing” and “She can pretend to be me / Since she took my place in my bed on that stage / I have not lost any sleep.”

Heralding Lost Weekend’s release was “Lost Boys,” a lead single that, much like viral hit “Kyoto,” deploys an upbeat rhythm and horns beneath hurt (or, at the very least, disappointed) lyrics. “Lost boys/ never grow up, never get old / Lost boys find me,” she says in the chorus. Whether that last line is taunting or mere statement of fact is left up to interpretation, but Bridgers definitely seems eager to let said lost boys find her in the last part of the song, when she says, “Come find me.” It’s tongue-in-cheek and maybe even a little mocking, which makes the song even more fun.

If anyone had any doubt about Cameron Winter lending his voice on this album (credited under the pseudonym Son-John Johnson), the proof is clear as day on the bridge of “I Can’t Wait.” There are more elements of pop here than anywhere else on the record, in the use of a drum machine and synths, but it’s still unmistakably Phoebe Bridgers, rife with guitars, harmonica, and pedal steel.

Winter appears once again in “Kill Me,” a lush and hazy cut rich with shimmering acoustic and steel guitars. Antonoff loves to use a baritone guitar, whether it’s for Taylor Swift or Lorde, and in this track, he uses it to imbue a heaviness that counters the song’s more gossamer elements. On the first listen, “Kill Me” also takes a surprising but welcome turn to feral and drum-heavy outro. It ends with Winter repeatedly singing, “Tamám shud,” Persian for “It is finished” — as if Bridgers were Jesus on the cross and Bobby, God (which just goes back to the line “You were made in the image of God” in “Liberty Tree”).

There’s something concerning about Bridgers speaking so catastrophically of love, but you can almost forget that when you hear “Bobby,” upbeat, washed in romantic bliss, and undoubtedly one of the highest points of Lost Weekend. In this track, Bridgers’ love for Bobby is at once apocalyptic and eternal. In the bridge, she repeats (with Burnham on backing vocals), “This could be the end,” but ends with the lines “Now I don’t know if I can make it tonight / But what are you doing the rest of my life, Bobby?” Where other songs reach a high point and get louder, “Bobby” starts loud without warning, and ends with a lone mellow synth for the outro.

Despite being a (reductively put) “sad” song, Lost Weekend’s title track is a standout for its structure, forgoing the usual verse-chorus-bridge format for 20 unrepeated lines. Bridgers gives us vignettes of parallel parking and sleep-talking, addressing an indeterminate “you.” “You know me, and I’ll never forgive you for that,” the last line says as the album’s leitmotif, this time in the form of a ghostly synth, floats in.

There’s a raw quality to the way Bridgers’ vocals are mixed in here, as if she’d used her voice notes for the track’s final cut, and with only an organ playing in the background, she’s in her most vulnerable state. But two-thirds of the way through, the organ begins to ripple, and then the track breaks into a minute of energetic ambient, a banjo and synthesizers both sizzling as a subdued kick drum pulses beneath. Nothing better defines an album than its title track (if it has one), and “Lost Weekend” captures all that there is love about Bridgers’ music and this new era.