No Phones in the Arena, Phoebe Bridgers Takes Barclays
The Lost Tour asks a Brooklyn arena to put its phones away for three nights, and boygenius walks back onstage
The phones go away before the music starts. For three nights at Barclays Center, from Thursday through tonight, an arena crowd is asked to watch a concert without filming a second of it.
That is the house rule of The Lost Tour, the arena run behind Phoebe Bridgers' album Lost Weekend, her first solo full length in six years. The album came out on August 14. The tour opened with two nights in Indianapolis on September 14, moved on to Chicago's United Center and Columbus, and reached Flatbush Avenue on Thursday for a three night Brooklyn stand with Alex G opening.
On the first of those nights, Bridgers brought out company. Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus walked onstage, and boygenius performed together for the first time since Grammy weekend in 2024. The trio played "Not Strong Enough" and "Cool About It," according to JamBase's report on the reunion. JamBase noted that "Not Strong Enough" won Grammys for Best Rock Song and Best Rock Performance that February, and that the group's 2023 album, the record, took Best Alternative Music Album.
Almost nobody filmed it. Stereogum found only a few clips online, each a couple of seconds long, and chose not to post them.
A Room Without Screens
JamBase reports that phones, video recording, and other devices are banned for the whole tour, with Yondr pouches to enforce it and removal from the venue for anyone who breaks the rule. The Chicago Sun-Times described how that worked at the United Center the week before. Security sealed phones and smartwatches into pouches clipped to lanyards, and some fans wore them slung across the body like small purses. A Sun-Times reporter was told phones could be unlocked in an emergency and that texting could happen in the atrium.
Bridgers has explained the policy from the stage. In Chicago, the Sun-Times reported, she told the crowd that grieving her father while so many cameras point her way feels impossible. She said she knows surrendering a phone for a couple of hours is a nuisance, and that it meant a lot to her that people did it anyway. At Barclays on Thursday, the music site mxdwn reported, she thanked the crowd for putting their phones away and said the intimacy of the new album was one reason she wanted shows without them.
Almost nobody filmed it.
The effect is an arena that listens. In Chicago, the Sun-Times reported, the crowd fell nearly silent as the show opened on Bridgers' voice run through a vocoder. The mxdwn review describes the same opening in Brooklyn, with "The Outside" pulsing through a big light fixture over the small stage before the main stage dome lifted to reveal the band. For an artist whose best known songs run on whispered detail and slow builds, that quiet is not a small thing. It turns a basketball arena into something closer to a very large bedroom at two in the morning.
The crowd dresses for it. The mxdwn review of the first Brooklyn night noted plenty of skeleton outfits, some fans dressed as aliens, and a lot of iridescent makeup in the seats, and it described the stage lighting shifting from blue to red for the run of songs from her album Punisher.
The Dome and the Second Stage
The production is built for scale without losing the whisper. The mxdwn review describes a dome over the main stage in Brooklyn that lifts in a cloud of fog and later tilts to show projections inside, a small circular stage across the floor, and a night sky on the screens behind the band. The Sun-Times review of the United Center shows goes further. In Chicago, the paper wrote, the dome steamed, hovered, and leaned back like a planetarium ceiling full of stars, while a ball of light over the second stage burst into color. Madden Kass played drums there, and Melina Duterte, who records as Jay Som, switched between trumpet, acoustic guitar, and synths.
The Sun-Times put the Chicago set at an hour and forty five minutes, mixing Lost Weekend material with older favorites like "Kyoto" and "I Know the End" before "Scott Street" closed the night. The Brooklyn set list in the mxdwn review follows the same shape, ending on "Kyoto" and "I Know the End" before an encore of "Lost Weekend (Reprise)" and "Scott Street."
The Sun-Times heard the album as a record that moves through love and loss toward acceptance, carried on synthesizers and folk rock. On a stage this size, those textures read as weather. The lights go red, then the screens fill with a night sky. The room follows.
A Weekend of Releases
The Brooklyn stand lands in the busiest week of Bridgers' year. On Friday she released "On Video," the song that plays over the end titles of Primetime, the new A24 film from director Lance Oppenheim. The movie is set in 2006 and stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the host of To Catch a Predator. It is also her acting debut, according to Consequence, and it reached theaters that same day.
As Stereogum noted in its roundup, she first played "On Video" live in Chicago the week before, and she wrote it with Jack Antonoff and Christian Lee Hutson. At Barclays on Thursday, it came right before boygenius walked out. Consequence heard a song that opens soft, blows up into a wall of distortion, and drifts back to something gentle and resigned. It is a fair summary of her whole catalog.
A reunion in front of a crowd with its phones put away feels like a very New York kind of gift. It happened, and the best record of it is what people carried out onto Flatbush Avenue in their heads.
The last Barclays show is tonight. After that the tour heads to Philadelphia on Monday and Washington the next night, with North American dates running through a three night stand at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood from October 30 to November 1, then a European leg in November and December.
New York has had a strange, crowded arena season. Harry Styles is still deep into his long home stand at Madison Square Garden. Brooklyn got something smaller in feeling, if not in size. Three nights of people standing in the dark, hands empty, waiting for the quiet part.
