This week, indie star Phoebe Bridgers releases her long-awaited third album, six years since her pandemic-era breakthrough. Alongside a slew of glittering reviews for Lost Weekend, including five stars from the Guardian, with it comes her first solo charting single in the UK – although the Californian musician’s influence runs far deeper than reviews or record sales could measure. Just how did a RuneScape-referencing, Halloween-costumed Berklee drop-out become the most influential songwriter of the 2020s?
Bridgers’ idiosyncratic writing has shaped the sound of the decade. Her second album Punisher, released in June 2020 (and recorded many months before), spookily anticipated that strange, lonely year: in her eerie double-tracked vocals (a nod to Bridgers’ musical hero, Elliott Smith), Bridgers sang of empty shopping malls and conspiracy theories over lush, unsettling music made from watery electric guitar, Mellotron, strings, screams and birdsong. Today, Bridgers’ distinctive mix of dry wit and pathos is traceable in the lyrics of pop’s new chart toppers, such as Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams, while heavyweights across generations and genres, including Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift and SZA, have clamoured for collaborations. “She is the reference now,” Swift told the Guardian in 2022.
