Phoebe Bridgers

Six years after the release of her much-fêted album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers announced her return earlier this year with a series of intimate gigs strung across the US like a line of clues. At stops in Roswell and Little Rock, Jackson and Savannah, she handed out cards that pieced together to form an illustration featuring cryptids under an astronomical wheel. What could it all mean? Across the internet, fans tore themselves apart trying to work out the significance of the images and begged those lucky enough to attend the gigs to describe the songs they had heard — a difficult endeavour, since attendees’ phones had been locked away in pouches for the duration of the gigs.

Following the release of the jangly lead single ‘Lost Boys’, the fever-pitch speculation came to an end last week with the release of Lost Weekend, a sprawling, shifting folk album inflected with country and Americana, infected by woozy electronic elements, and incubated by contributors as various as Alex G, Jack Antonoff, and Christian Lee Hutson. Drawing immediate comparisons to the bone-deep lyricism of albums like Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell and sonic experimentation of Bon Iver’s later work, it felt immediately obvious that Bridgers herself was the cryptid under the astronomical wheel: a rare sort of artist, able to boil down the never-ending wonders of the universe into her own specific mythology.

Then, like a shooting star, Bridgers offered fans one final gift, announcing a run of intimate shows across London, Brighton and Bristol in the south of England. Tickets were near-impossible to get, but we were lucky enough to be in attendance at Union Chapel in London last night. From the off, it was clear this would be a special evening, the stage at the centre of the 19th century Gothic Revival church dressed up like the bedroom of a California teenager, complete with a sofa, lava lamps, and blurry-screened televisions. Bridgers arrived on stage and sat comfortably at the centre, wasting no time getting stuck in to a performance of ‘Motion Sickness’ from her first album Stranger in the Alps, a fan favourite that immediately drew the crowd in. With the audience captured, she brought the new album to life, ripping through the stadium-ready anthem ‘Bobby’ and ‘Lost Boys’ before slowing things down with the more introspective gut punch of tracks like ‘The Governor’s Waltz’ and ‘I Can’t Wait’. Moving delicately from song to song, it was clear that though the album contains all the hallmarks of Bridgers’ earlier works (tumultuous father figures; the jagged edges of love; existential angst), it sits these within a brighter, more optimistic palette that draws from a nurturing relationship that has helped her process past grief.

Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the lack of phones, however. Without a sea of screens to contend with, the audience could take in the finer elements of the production: the constellations projected across the stage, the fluorescent blanket tossed across the sofa and glowing under an ultraviolet light, and the stained glass window of Union Chapel lighting up a deep purple once darkness descended outside. So too did fans find inventive, active ways to give back to Bridgers on stage, flicking on lighters to illuminate the dark church and singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to celebrate the singer’s thirty-second turn around the sun, coincidentally falling on the day of the gig. Each of these moments would have floundered if the audience were to have recorded and dissected them. Emblematic of what Bridgers and her team have worked so hard to achieve, the evening offered fans a rare opportunity to see an artist baring it all in a space that can sustain the full weight of her emotion. Sometimes a chance to strip back the pageantry and take in the moment is all that’s needed, especially when the music can more than speak for itself.