Phoebe Bridgers review – high priestess of ambiguity turns grief Technicolor in intimate church show

Three days after the rapturous release of her third album, Lost Weekend, Phoebe Bridgers invites 900 people into her bedroom to hear her play some of its devastating songs live – or at least, that’s how it feels inside Union Chapel in north London on this Monday night. With Bridgers plopped on a throw-covered sofa, surrounded by lava lamps and with a TV showing the bouncing DVD logo screensaver, it becomes easy to forget the Victorian gothic architecture looming above our heads.

This intimate scene is the indie superstar’s hugely anticipated first solo UK show since 2022, and the reverent awe in the church is palpable. Fans have obediently locked away their phones in magnetic pouches – as they will also have to on her arena run later this year – and fidget in the pews clutching CDs and T-shirts emblazoned with the artwork for her new record. You can hear a proverbial pin drop when Bridgers opens the show by belting her breakout song Motion Sickness solo with her guitar, her voice somersaulting around the domed ceiling. (After this, she is joined on stage by two bandmates, Nick White and Christian Lee Hutson.) But Bridgers, who hums with a slightly nervous energy, characteristically pierces through any solemnity by encouraging us to scream and sing along as the gig rolls on. After all, she quips: “God’s watching – fuckin’ freak.”

The jokes and the screams feel like necessary pressure-relief valves, as Lost Weekend takes centre stage at this show. Focused primarily on the tangled knot of grief she feels for her father, who died in 2023, the album is a vividly cathartic body of work that, as Bridgers puts it: “I really did scrape from the bottom of my guts.” It is also the artist’s most musically adventurous outing yet, cloaked in a bewitching fog of crackling ambience reminiscent of Grouper, and surreal, robotic vocoder. But for this release show, she dismantles the songs to their parts, with just two guitars, keys, harmonica and the occasional addition of percussion and ghostly FX.

In this spectral, spare form, the songs are even more astounding. You can really hear the bristling, soft rage as Bridgers sings: “Sometimes I want you back / But not today,” on Still Standing, an unflinching portrait of her “complicated” relationship with her dad. (This song and others reference his physical abuse of Bridgers’ mother.) Likewise, the seething lyrics of The Governor’s Waltz, which appears to reflect on the breakdown of her engagement to Paul Mescal, seem to send a shiver through the congregation. Her words cut even deeper when near-whispered.

But it’s not all quiet worship. At points, stomping percussion rises to the rafters, Bridgers uses effects to contort and throw her voice, and Hutson plays some of the most ominous harmonica ever heard on their rendition of Kill Me. Then, of course, there is the album’s title track, which cracks open from a soft ballad into a triumphant clatter and swell of strings, electronic chatter and disembodied voices.

In the Union Chapel, the song’s climax is highlighted with UV light, giving Bridgers’ blond bob and the images of planets hung behind her a creepy glow. At first, the effect is so incongruous to be almost funny – but then its uncanniness starts to make sense. Bridgers is often described in shorthand as a purveyor of “sad songs”, but what her latest release proves more than ever is that her writing contains vast emotional worlds. On Lost Weekend, she sketches grief as the sharpest edge of life: a time when your memories of the past feel so intense as to be Technicolor, and the present can feel like a distant fog; when emotions are both muted and turned up to 11. It makes sense that on the first UK live outing for these deliciously complex songs, there is humour and surrealism to be found even in the devastating dark.