In June 2020, while the world's shopping malls stood empty and its conspiracy theories multiplied like spores, a Californian singer-songwriter quietly released an album that had already predicted everything. Punisher — recorded long before the pandemic arrived — arrived with eerie precision: its double-tracked vocals, Mellotron drones, birdsong, and buried screams seemed to have taken the temperature of a year that had not yet fully begun. That songwriter was Phoebe Bridgers, a Berklee drop-out who once turned up to a music video in a Halloween skeleton costume, and whose references ran to the medieval fantasy game RuneScape as readily as to Elliott Smith. She was, in other words, deeply unusual — and she was about to become enormously influential.

Six years on, her third album, Lost Weekend, has arrived to a chorus of five-star reviews and, for the first time, a solo charting single in the United Kingdom. The record moves into territory that is unmistakably personal: the death of her father, the dissolution of her engagement to Irish actor Paul Mescal. Yet even grief, in Bridgers' hands, is shot through with surreal comedy. On the Tonight Show, she performed the single Lost Boys twice in the same broadcast — once with a band of visibly delighted children, and once in a spare acoustic arrangement with folk veteran Dan Reeder — producing an effect that was at once tender, trippy, and faintly unsettling.

The word most critics reached for was the same one her admirers always use: distinctly Phoebe. That distinctiveness has quietly colonised the broader landscape of popular music. Writers and critics can now trace her dry-witted, devastatingly precise lyricism in the work of chart-toppers such as Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams. Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift, and SZA have each sought her out for collaborations — a list that spans generations, genres, and continents.