Phoebe Bridgers Hosts Listening Party on Roller Skates: Her New Album Lives in Real Life, Not on Your Phone

Whether or not you could keep up with Phoebe Bridgers determined whether you got a chance to talk to her that night. On Tuesday, August 11, she showed up at Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale, Los Angeles, to host a listening party for her third studio album, "Lost Weekend," which dropped the next day. One fan later wrote on Reddit: "She actually skated around with everyone — if you could keep up you could say hi to her, but she's genuinely fast, so it might be a bit tough."

There was something inherently odd about the whole scene. "Lost Weekend" is a 16-track album that NME described as "confessional to the point of a gut punch," and Bridgers herself admitted the pairing does sound "weird." Speaking during a Q&A in front of about 200 fans seated on the rink floor, she said: "I've always had this idea in my head that it would be cool to do something like a Grouper Moonlight Night. People usually skate to stuff like ABBA, and I was wondering if skating to sad, slow songs might actually be interesting instead."

She hadn't done any interviews ahead of the album's release, but in this informal setting she opened up a bit about the background of the record. When a fan asked what media had influenced her, she mentioned: "There's a movie called Lost Weekend, about that dazed, out-of-it state that alcoholics go through — it kind of fits the album, just in an unfortunate way."

More notably, she explained why she chose this kind of small-scale, tour-style promotion instead of the usual online buildup. "I just wanted everything about this album to feel like it was actually happening in real life," she said. "I never lived through an era where you could find out about things without the internet — even a really cool pop-up event ultimately gets spread through phones. So I really liked the idea of just putting up posters around a small town — it was genuinely fun to do."

Before the Q&A, she also played a rough cut of the still-being-edited music video for "I Can't Wait," which will later incorporate aerial footage from this skating event.

"Lost Weekend" officially released on Friday, August 14. Next week, Bridgers will hold a few phone-free intimate shows in the UK, followed by "The Lost Tour," starting in North America before moving to the UK and Europe in November and December, with UK and Ireland dates including Dublin's 3Arena, Manchester's Co-op Live, and London's The O2. NME gave "Lost Weekend" a five-star review, with critic Erica Campbell writing that the album is "not an evasion of emotion, but a direct confrontation with herself, and with the love and loss that have shaped her story and the way she tells it."