Holly Wilks is a London-based writer and musician who writes about music, literature and culture. Her essays look at how artists make their work and why it lands the way it does. More of her writing is on her Substack, hollywilks.substack.com.
Phoebe Bridgers’ long-awaited third album, Lost Weekend, arrived on August 14, her first solo album since 2020, and I personally believe it was very much worth the wait. Punisher (2020) became a defining album of the lockdown era, its existential and apocalyptic themes landing eerily well. The album marked Phoebe’s commercial and critical breakthrough, establishing her as a true indie darling. Her soft vocal style and existential lyrics seem to have inspired a tidal wave of next-gen singer-songwriters. Phoebe leans into her dark side, whether through ghostly visuals or blunt writing about death, and has made it her superpower. That, combined with her natural ability to pen the hardest of human emotions into couplets and gorgeous melodies, has set her apart from the beginning of her career. The six-year wait between albums has done Phoebe a favour, with the value lying less in the time itself than in her willingness to hold back until there was something she felt was necessary to say.
Lost Weekend is unequivocally part of the Phoebe-verse, though she has managed to create a whole new world yet again, making it hard to imagine any of these tracks on either of her prior albums. Standout lyrics like ‘your back to the ocean / burning red / I can’t imagine you dead / but you are / everyday’ beautifully capture the difficulty of accepting the permanence of grief and loss. Pairing snapshot images with lines of deep introspection means we never get more information than we need, allowing these images to land as if we are with Phoebe, remembering and reflecting on these moments throughout her life. ‘Haunted’ boasts backing vocals from boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, and is my favourite song on the album. The acoustic guitar leading the song from the start, and the harmonies from Dacus and Baker in the bridge, feel very boygenius-esque and show how Phoebe is taking things she has learnt and loved while doing other projects and bringing them into her own work. For that reason, this album feels like it couldn’t have been made by 2020 Phoebe, because it required growth and natural development for it to exist.
And I actually believe that is key to why this album lands as well as it does. She did not rush to finish another album off the back of Punisher‘s success; she seemed to care more about releasing something when the time was right. She did still put out an album in 2023, the record, as one third of boygenius, but that project grew out of genuine friendship and a desire to create, with Dacus saying at the time that ‘originally it was just a fun lightweight idea. Now it’s [her] whole life’. It feels as though it was conceived without the expectation of success, and that was a big part of why I think they and the music were so magnetic. You could see and feel how much fun they were having and hear that passion in the music too. They cared about all the right stuff, and everything else was a bonus.
This mindset is difficult to achieve in an industry increasingly built around gaining and maintaining attention, and I’m aware not all artists can afford to spend all their time on passion projects. Many artists have thresholds they need to meet, rent to pay, and label advances hanging over their heads. That said, some big artists, well positioned to take the reins, still seem to value quantity over quality. Take Gracie Abrams, for example. Daughter From Hell arrived two years after its predecessor, The Secret of Us (2024), which included mega-hits like “That’s So True” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry” that propelled Gracie to a new level of stardom. Although I think Daughter From Hell is listenable, I struggle with the sense that it lacks thoughtfulness overall. “Minibar”, written with Audrey Hobert, who also wrote on The Secret of Us, is catchy, but it could easily have been a track or bonus track on that album, with a similar wordy lyrical style and production from the same primary producer, Aaron Dessner. I enjoyed the lead single “Hit the Wall” because it signalled an interesting change of direction. Still, I struggled to find that same experimentation anywhere else on the album. “Good Reason” is a great song melodically and sits confidently on my ‘on repeat’ Spotify playlist, but with songs like “Sober” and “Imaginary Friend”, I wonder if there was much thought behind including them beyond them sounding nice. I also struggle with the limp ‘daughter from hell’ concept, which is never really explored or explained beyond a single song. Ultimately, I was left wondering why these particular songs belonged together.
Though it depends on who Gracie is making her music for. Her fanbase skews young and belongs to a generation where TikTok and playlisting play major roles in music discovery. These changes have normalised engaging with individual tracks found through playlists or short-form snippets, without necessarily delving into the artist or album they belong to. So, if the aim is to please her fan base, then Gracie arguably doesn’t have to worry too much about creating a perfectly coherent and polished album. If the demand for the music is there, why not give it to them? However, based on how Gracie positions herself aesthetically and how she talks about her music, it seems to me that she wants the wider musical community, peers and critics to take her seriously. She doesn’t strike me as someone positioning herself as a ‘fun popstar who makes the music she wants and isn’t expecting five-star reviews from indie music critics across the board’ (think Zara Larsson); she wants to be seen as introspective and dark, and adjacent to artists like Phoebe. The violent imagery that spans the album, from knives to pills to blades and bullets, is enough to suggest this on its own. To receive the kind of critical attention her artistic positioning invites, she would have to find a middle ground between feeding her hungry fans and taking the time to craft an album that brings something new to the table.
I’m not suggesting every artist needs six years between albums to produce something good. Taylor Swift’s Folklore (2020) came out 11 months after Lover (2019), and the rest of the world and I love that album. It seems less about time itself and more about necessity, and having the artistic integrity to wait until you have something to say. Phoebe herself said “when I ask for people’s attention, it will be for something I worked very hard on”, and whether she asks for that attention again in a year or in ten, she will have mine, because I trust that it won’t have been born because it could be, but because she felt it had to be.
Photo: Phoebe Bridgers performing at Shaky Knees, Atlanta, 2021. Thomson200, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
