{"id":514752,"date":"2026-06-28T07:07:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T07:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/514752\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T07:07:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T07:07:28","slug":"phoebe-bridgers-lost-boys-review-ghosts-guns-and-guileless-youth-on-generational-songwriters-return-phoebe-bridgers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/514752\/","title":{"rendered":"Phoebe Bridgers: Lost Boys review \u2013 ghosts, guns and guileless youth on generational songwriter\u2019s return | Phoebe Bridgers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since her Boygenius supergroup with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus went on hiatus in February 2024, Phoebe Bridgers has taken a wholehearted break from life in the public eye. Who could blame her? Bridgers became a figure of invasive parasocial behaviour from fans after her spooked, sad second album, 2020\u2019s Punisher<\/a>, 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 \u2013 and none more so than Bridgers and her 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\u2019s funeral.<\/p>\n

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 advertising surprise $1 Bridgers shows in intimate venues later that night, before a concluding gig at New York\u2019s 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 \u2013 some fans accused her of ableism \u2013 prompted its own backlash, a tiresome Russian doll of discourse that\u2019s still dragging on.<\/p>\n

More heartening was how determined some fans were about honouring her wishes: the r\/phoebebridgers subreddit has been hawkish about deleting excessive descriptions of the new songs. There are no clips of the shows on YouTube. Two other ways you might measure the excitement for the return of a generational songwriter \u2013 \u201cshe is the reference now,\u201d Taylor Swift told me in 2022<\/a> \u2013 come in very different forms. There\u2019s so little information available about what she\u2019s up to that Rolling Stone published a behind-the-scenes interview<\/a> with photographer Gregory Crewdson about how he shot one of her comeback images \u2013 not even the album cover. And on Bridgers\u2019 Instagram, two of the top comments on a post announcing her return are from Simon Pegg and the Minions.<\/p>\n

Lost Boys, the first song to be released from Bridgers\u2019 third album, also feels a little like a vestige from a pre-smartphone age. Co-produced by Bridgers and her usual crew of Ethan Gruska and Tony Berg \u2013 plus pop zelig Jack Antonoff \u2013 the ornate fingerpicked 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 G, here on additional production. Earnest, intricate and old-fashioned, it\u2019s a rugged upgrade from Bridgers\u2019 trademark silvery sound \u2013 one that changed pop, from Swift\u2019s Folklore<\/a> to Gracie Abrams<\/a>\u2019 trembling songcraft, and left fans wondering what she might do to evolve away from that. The rattling chime of the production builds to the most room-filling, satisfying chorus Bridgers has ever written: \u201cLost boys never grow up, never grow old,\u201d she sings, with rhapsodic warmth, backed by her Boygenius bandmates.<\/p>\n

The verses contrast a youth spent in the army decades ago with maybe a different kind of romantic deserter, moving from East Berlin, military-issue haircuts and kids being given rifles to wondering about the future with a lover who immediately skips out on it. Obsessive fans will be scouring for clues to work out who it\u2019s about, but multiplicity of Lost Boys resists boring detective work: how it flashes between memory and the future, intimacy and estrangement, Bridgers\u2019 perspective and others, as much anthem as lament. At least, from the whirlwind crescendo to that misty voice \u2013 and the unavoidable presence of ghosts \u2013 there\u2019s absolutely no doubting who it\u2019s by.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since her Boygenius supergroup with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus went on hiatus in February 2024, Phoebe Bridgers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-514752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}