Lost Weekend Review

Six years is a long silence and Bridgers uses it to change what her records are for. The guitars step back, ambient pads and synthesizers step forward, and the first voice on the album is hers pushed through a vocoder while she describes crying in a suit and tie at her father's funeral. That image is the whole project: grief handled at a slight remove because handling it directly is not possible yet.

Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska return, Jack Antonoff and Alex Giannascoli join them, and the production is the most adventurous of her career without ever raising its voice. The writing is where it lands. The title track names an engagement she called off, Still Standing puts her mother bleeding over a sink in the middle of a song about what gets inherited, and the closing reprise admits she is more like her difficult father than she wanted to be.

Critics have been close to unanimous, with the warmest notices going to how the album moves rather than to any single song on it. That movement is also the one real cost. Fifty two minutes at this volume asks a great deal, several tracks resolve into texture rather than shape, and the atmosphere occasionally swallows the songs it is carrying. It is the least immediate thing she has made and the most complete.