Phoebe Bridgers has a filmmaker’s eye for a cold open. Sometimes her songs disorient from the jump, dropping you into an alien landscape or the middle of an argument. Other times she draws you in with a dreamy establishing shot—and then snaps it into sharp, unsparing focus. “I was the belle of the Governor’s Ball,” begins one song on her new album, “Lost Weekend.” Then she continues, in her usual hushed head voice: “Hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall.” The reference to the climactic scene in “The Shining,” delivered delicately over a lullaby in waltz time, comes off as both foreboding and gently self-mocking. For a certain type of person, having a terrible time at a party can feel like being pursued by an axe murderer.

These kinds of seemingly effortless lines, lines that take a small shard of experience and hold it up to the light, offer some clues as to how the thirty-one-year-old Bridgers earned her reputation as one of her generation’s standout songwriters. Over the past decade, across three solo albums and a raft of collaborative projects, she has honed one of the most distinctive songwriting voices in indie rock today—wryly observational, ruthlessly introspective, downcast but never wallowing. Her 2020 album, “Punisher,” featured her sharpest songs yet, and it arrived at the perfect time. Depression—its little humiliations and stretches of nullity, but also the unexpected flashes of insight it can produce—is Bridgers’s chief subject. The stride she made on “Punisher” was to telescope her songs’ depression outward, transforming it from a state of isolation to, paradoxically, a state of receptivity to the world outside. That first pandemic summer, songs such as “Chinese Satellite” and “I Know the End” captured something about the texture of life in lockdown, the combination of stultifying routine and longing for a wider ambit of experience.

“Punisher” was a star-making album for Bridgers. In the years since, though, she has kept a lower profile, pouring much of her energy into collaborative projects, including boygenius, her band with the singer-songwriters Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. Life happened: She was reportedly engaged to the actor Paul Mescal, and then she was not; in late 2022, her father, the subject of some of her most brutally ambivalent songs, died. Sometime around then, she began dating the musical comedian Bo Burnham. Meanwhile, her work has become a stylistic reference point for a younger generation of artists in the increasingly hazy middle zone between indie music and chart pop. In Olivia Rodrigo’s tragicomic abjection, in Audrey Hobert’s neurotically self-undercutting lyrics, in just about everything on the slick surface of Gracie Abrams’s studiously crafted pop product, Bridgers is a presiding spirit.

“Lost Weekend” announces itself as a return from time spent in the wilderness. “WIFE IS HOME FROM WAR,” read one typically parasocial fan comment on a promotional Instagram post. “Lemme up my medication in advance,” read another—Bridgers’s fans like to joke about the emotionally devastating effect of her music. Yet the album begins not with catharsis but with dissociation. On the opening track, “The Outside,” Bridgers sings through a vocoder, multiplying her voice into a metallic swarm. From this alien-drone perspective, she narrates two scenes: in the first verse, her father’s funeral; in the second, performing onstage. The song is about not being able to inhabit either experience fully. “I am on the outside, watching,” goes the uncharacteristically laconic chorus, as the vocoder drops away.

Bridgers’s great trick, though, is to set these two experiences against one another as a diptych. A “fist through the drywall” in the first verse glances off a “fist in the air” in the second; “I’ll watch him get carried away,” already suggestive of both a funeral procession and a violent outburst, is answered in the second verse with “Ohio, carry me away.” This is an image of crowd-surfing, but it is also a nod to a song by Sun Kil Moon, a formative influence on Bridgers whose creator, Mark Kozelek, has himself been known to fly into nasty tirades in public. (Separately, Kozelek has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women. He denies all allegations of wrongdoing.) Zoning out and leaving your body starts to look less like a defense mechanism and more like a poetic device for revealing hidden patterns of experience. Dissociation becomes its opposite: a kind of imaginative association.

In an early interview, Bridgers mentioned wanting to be “one of those artists that . . . could release an electronic record or a country record next, and nobody would be surprised.” Some eight years later, no one would exactly describe her in those terms. Her first two albums have distinct sonic identities, but the songs sometimes bleed into one another. She has a finely tuned ear for melody, but she is not a writer of earworms; her melodies tend to follow the lateral, associative chain of her lyrics. They take hold after repeat listens. Listening to her music again and again, in fact, is the key to seeing the larger shape of her ambition. Bridgers is not a serial self-reinventor like David Bowie or even Joni Mitchell—she is a polisher and a honer. She is the kind of artist who seems to have two or three basic musical templates for songs and is constantly creating new versions of them. (The clearest-cut case is boygenius’s “Letter to An Old Poet,” which interpolates and updates the earlier “Me & My Dog,” Bridgers’s signature song on the band’s first album.)

“Lost Weekend” is the first Bridgers album to take full advantage of her music’s extreme consistency. It is also the most cohesive and sonically immersive of her records, thanks to her intricate co-production with her usual collaborators Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, along with the newcomers Jack Antonoff and Alex G. A crowded room of guests fills out the sound; some even briefly steal the show, as in the poignant harmony vocals by one “Son-John Johnson,” which can only be a pseudonym for the wobbly-voiced indie-rock singer Cameron Winter. The atmosphere of the album is not too far off from the soft-focus glow of “Punisher,” but some of the dials are cranked way up: Bridgers has said that she’s been listening to a lot of ambient music, and it shows. Dreamy interludes pad the space between tracks with humming synths and strings; sometimes songs dissolve into floating mood pieces, anchored by a drone or loop. If you give “Lost Weekend” the right kind of attention, you might get the sense that it does not consist of individual songs so much as a vast nebula of sound, from which fragments of music flash out, and into which they eventually subside. Appropriately, leading up to the album’s release, Bridgers organized special listening sessions in planetariums.

Figures go down into the cosmic foam, only to turn up later in different forms. “Lost Boys,” the album’s first single, gathers a whirl of images of prolonged adolescence: speeding motorcycles, violent tantrums, twin beds. Each verse seems to address a potentially different “you,” or perhaps a composite person who comes off as a charming but exasperating man-child. But then the triumphant final chorus embraces every possible nettlesome “you” at once: “Lost boys / Come find me / Yeah!” It’s an incredible moment of rock-and-roll reconciliation, on par with the climactic “You are forgiven!” in the Who’s “A Quick One, While He’s Away.”

Redemption feels just around the corner throughout “Lost Weekend.” This, too, is something new in Bridgers’s catalogue. “This could be the end of wanting,” she sings on “Bobby,” the album’s most raucous track, which is also a tender love song. “Thank you for everything,” she sings at the end of “Still Standing,” which up to that point has been an unsparing catalogue of traumatic memory fragments. But the most potent redemption on the record is enacted musically. Two melodic themes recur throughout the album: a lilting wordless “ooh,” part waltz and part dirge, and a more energetic fanfare. Each gets elaborated across several songs, gathers associations along the way, and finds its ultimate expression in the final two tracks. In “As Above,” the fanfare gains words, seeming to herald the future: Bridgers sings, at the very top of her range, and in full chest voice for once, “You don’t have to believe in magic / Leave it to me and I’ll make it happen.” At the end of the final song, “Lost Weekend (Reprise),” the waltz theme whirls in one more time to send off the past. It’s less a final resolution than an acknowledgment that things keep moving. The stars wink out on the screen, but you can still feel the sky spinning. ♦