Phoebe Bridgers: The Lost Boys review – ghosts, guns and gullible youth in the songwriter’s comeback | Phoebe Bridgers

Men printing materials for Phoebe Bridgers‘ back, the 31-year-old US singer talks about taking time off to make her third album after feeling “a bit world-weary” from public life. Who can blame him? Bridgers became a negative image from fans after his disappointing sophomore album, 2020. Punisherhe lived a life of confinement and made him the highest. In recent years, the young women who make beautiful and beautiful indie-rock music have risen to the top, in popularity and in the spotlight – and none more so than Bridgers, her group Boygenius with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and their friends Mitski. When Bridgers was rumored to be engaged in 2022, fans who had her destructive lyrics dampened her joy; when she started a new relationship, gossip started. In 2023, he criticized so-called fans who abused him at the airport on his way to his father’s funeral.

Even his recent return to analogue has made people do what they can to have an artist who doesn’t have to wonder why they bother. Last month, mysterious signs began to appear in small towns across the US $ 1 Bridgers shows in clubs that night, before the last gig at Madison Square Garden in New York. Phones were banned, and any type of recording device, including pen and paper, to prevent listeners from recording the lyrics of his third album and sharing them online. The return of this – some fans criticized him for being able – led to his controversy, a tiresome Russian toy that continues.

What’s even more encouraging is how determined some fans have been to honor his wishes: the ar/phoebebridgers subreddit has been clamoring to remove more and more descriptions of the new music. There are no video clips on YouTube. Two other ways you can experience the joy of the return of the legendary songwriter – “he and witness now,” Taylor Swift told me in 2022 – come in different ways. There is little information available on what he is doing in the Rolling Stone publication talking behind the scenes and photographer Gregory Crewdson about how he shot one of his comeback photos – even the album cover. And on Instagram ‘Bridgers’, the top two comments on the post announcing his return are from Simon Pegg and the Minions.

Lost Boys, the first single released from Bridgers’ third album, also feels a bit like a holdover from the pre-smartphone age. Produced by Bridgers and his regular team of Ethan Gruska and Tony Berg – plus pop zelig Jack Antonoff – finger-picked guitar and stormy winds bring back memories of the Sufjan Stevens country in Michigan and Illinois, with a touch of the ramshackle excess of Alex G, here for extras. Real, complex and classic, it’s a solid lift from Bridgers’s silvery voice – which revolutionized pop, from Swift’s. Folklore to Gracie Abrams‘ rocking songs, leaving fans wondering what they can do to change. The production’s powerful vocals build to a packed, soulful room where Bridgers once wrote: “Lost boys don’t grow up, they don’t grow old,” he sings, with rhapsodic warmth, aided by fellow Boygenius.

These verses contrast a young man who became a soldier decades ago with perhaps another kind of love, coming from East Berlin, military haircuts and children being given guns to think about the future with a lover who jumps right in. Viewers will be searching for more to find out who they are, but the amount of Lost Boys resists the tedious task of searching: how it appears between memory and the future, intimate relationships and conflicts, the feelings of Bridgers and others, a song as rich as a funeral. At least, from the whirlwind to the blind voices – and the inevitable presence of ghosts – there’s no mistaking who it is.