Phoebe Bridgers – Lost Boys
Phoebe Bridgers has released “Lost Boys”, her first original solo material in four years and the lead single from her third album, Lost Weekend, out August 14 on Dead Oceans. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s Punisher, arriving after a stretch defined more by Boygenius than solo work, and her most recent prior single was 2022’s “Sidelines.”
The song opens on a vocoder-filtered intro before Bridgers’ voice comes through clearly, and from there it builds the way the loudest moments on Punisher used to: horns swelling under an anthemic chorus that’s built to be sung back at her. The “Lost Boys” of the title never grow up, never go home, never have to spend their lunch money, a Peter Pan escape hatch from what she calls “the machine” elsewhere in the song. Underneath the fantasy there’s a sharper, more specific story, a motorcycle ride too fast for the speed limit, a fight in East Berlin that turned physical, a relationship that ended somewhere between forgiveness and not quite recovering. The chorus stays buoyant even as the verses get heavier, which is the contrast the whole song is built on.
The credits read like a reunion. Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Caroline Shaw sing; Alex G plays drums and contributes additional production; Jack Antonoff handles guitar, synths, and vocoder; Nate Walcott brings trumpet; Blake Mills plays synths; Chris Thile plays mandolin; Christian Lee Hutson is on acoustic guitar. The list runs longer than that, by most accounts it includes Marshall Vore, Sebastian Steinberg, Rob Moose, and several others, which tracks with how layered the song sounds. Bridgers produced it herself alongside Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, and Antonoff.
I like that “Lost Boys” doesn’t pretend the fantasy is uncomplicated. It just lets you have it anyway, at least for the length of the song. The video, directed by Lance Oppenheim (who made the Ren Faire documentary for HBO) and Pablo Rochat, drops Bridgers into a Renaissance-fair fantasy alongside Skyler Gisondo, a convenience store clerk who gets swept into knighthood, the two of them eventually rendered as pixelated characters inside an old video game by the end. It’s a strange, sincere setting for a song that’s ultimately about refusing to grow up, even while admitting that refusal isn’t entirely healthy either.
Bridgers will tour the album this fall on the device-free “Lost Tour,” starting September 15 in Indianapolis and running through the US, UK, and Europe, including a sold-out Berlin date on December 9 and a Düsseldorf show the night before.
Tour dates:
Europe:
- Dec. 8 / Düsseldorf, Germany / PSD Bank Dome
- Dec. 9 / Berlin, Germany / Velodrom (sold out)
