Phoebe Bridgers: The Lost Boys Review – Ghosts, Guns and Naive Youth When Generational Songwriters Return | Phoebe Bridgers

IIn press materials for Phoebe Bridgers’ comeback, the 31-year-old American singer talks about taking time to prepare her third album after becoming “a little world-weary” about life in general. Who can blame her? Bridgers became a fan favorite after her creepy, sad second album, 2020’s Punisher, resonated with life under lockdown and made her a breakout star. In recent years, young women making embellished indie rock songs have risen to dizzying levels of fame and scrutiny — and none more so than Bridgers, her supergroup Boygenius with Julianne Baker and Lucy Dacus, and their counterpart Mitski. When Bridgers was rumored to be engaged in 2022, fans obsessed with her devastating music expressed her excitement; When I started a new relationship, the gossip mill flourished. In 2023, she criticized the so-called fans who assaulted her at the airport while she was on her way to her father’s funeral.

Even its recent analogue comeback has sparked reactions that might make a less laid-back artist wonder why they bothered. Last month, mysterious posters began appearing in small towns across the United States for surprise $1 promotions for Bridgers in intimate venues later that night, before the closing ceremony at New York’s giant Madison Square Garden. Phones were banned, along with any type of recording device, including pen and paper, to prevent the public from writing lyrics from her third album and sharing them online. The backlash to this – with some fans accusing her of discriminating against people with disabilities – has led to a backlash of her own, a tired Russian doll of rhetoric that continues.

What’s even more encouraging is how determined some fans are to respect her wishes: the r/phoebebridgers subreddit has been strict about deleting excessive descriptions of new songs. There are no clips of the shows on YouTube. There are two other ways you can gauge the excitement for the return of a generational songwriter — “Her He is “Reference now,” Taylor Swift told me in 2022 — comes in very different forms. There’s very little information available about what she’s up to, with Rolling Stone publishing a behind-the-scenes interview with photographer Gregory Crewdson about how one of her comeback photos was shot — not even the album cover. And on Bridgers’ Instagram, two of the top comments on a post announcing her return are from Simon Pegg and Minions.

Lost Boys, the first single to be released from Bridgers’ third album, also sounds like a relic from the pre-smartphone era. Co-produced by Bridgers and her regular crew of Ethan Gruska and Tony Berg—plus Zelig pop sensation Jack Antonoff—the ornate guitar and darting woodwinds bring to mind the organic filigrees of Sufjan Stevens circa Michigan and Illinois, with touches of the ramshackle opulence of Alex Gee, here in additional production. It’s earnest, complex and old-fashioned, a solid upgrade from Bridgers’ trademark silvery sound — a sound that changed pop music, from the folk of Swift to the trembling ballads of Gracie Abrams, and left fans wondering what she could do to evolve beyond that. The production’s twang is matched by the most satisfying, soulful chorus Bridgers has ever written: “Lost boys never grow up, never grow up,” she sings with impassioned warmth, backed by her Boygenius bandmates.

The verses contrast a young man who spent in the army decades ago, perhaps with a different kind of romantic deserter, moving from East Berlin, with military-style haircuts, and children who are given rifles to wonder about a future with a lover who promptly abandons him. Obsessed fans will search for clues to find out who it’s about, but the multiplicity of the missing boys resists tedious detective work: how it flashes between memory and future, intimacy and estrangement, and the perspective of Bridgers and others, as much as an anthem as an elegy. At least, from the crescendo of a tornado to that blurry sound – and the inevitable presence of ghosts – there’s absolutely no doubt as to the identity of the person standing next to him.