Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Boys review – ghosts, guns and guileless youth on generational songwriter’s return
(Dead Oceans) The US singer took years off after becoming ‘world-weary’ of public life – and in the meantime, her silvery balladry reshaped pop. Her
(Dead Oceans) The US singer took years off after becoming ‘world-weary’ of public life – and in the meantime, her silvery balladry reshaped pop. Her return is an ornate reinvention In the press materials for Phoebe Bridgers ’ return, the 31-year-old US singer talks about taking time to make her third album after coming to feel “a little world-weary” about public life. Who could blame her? Bridgers became a figure of invasive parasocial behaviour from fans after her spooked, sad second album, 2020’s Punisher, resonated with life under lockdown and made her a superstar.
In recent years, young women making introspective and ornate indie-rock songs have risen to startling, pop star levels of fame and scrutiny – and none more so than Bridgers, her Boygenius supergroup with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and their peer Mitski. When Bridgers was rumoured to be engaged in 2022, fans possessed by her devastating music rued her happiness; when she started a new relationship, the gossip mill churned. In 2023, she castigated the so-called fans who aggressed her in an airport while on the way to her father’s funeral.
Even her recent analogue return has prompted reactions that might have a less self-possessed artist wondering why they bother. Last month, mysterious posters started appearing in small towns across the US surprise $1 Bridgers shows in intimate venues later that night, before a concluding gig at New York’s gigantic Madison Square Garden. Phones were banned, along with any kind of recording device, including pen and paper, to stop audience members from writing down lyrics from her third album and sharing them online.
The backlash to this – some fans accused her of ableism – prompted its own backlash, a tiresome Russian doll of discourse that’s still dragging on. Continue reading...
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