Phoebe Bridgers announced The Lost Tour on Friday morning, her first full-band solo tour since 2023, a fall arena run beginning September 15 in Indianapolis and moving through Chicago, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto and beyond, the morning after she played a sold-out acoustic show at Madison Square Garden where she unveiled eight new songs that will presumably make up the core of her still-unannounced third studio album.
She has not released new solo material in approximately six years if you count from Punisher. She has not released new solo material in three years if you start from Boygenius's The Record.
She has not performed solo in three years by any measure. On Thursday night she played eight songs the audience had never heard before to a sold-out MSG crowd that had waited through all of that silence to be in the room when she came back.
The Lost Tour is the announcement that follows from that moment. General onsale is June 12.
The Pop-Up Tour That Got Everyone Here
The specific path that led Phoebe Bridgers to Madison Square Garden on Thursday night and then to a tour announcement on Friday morning began with a printed flyer.
In early May, eagle-eyed social media users in Roswell, New Mexico noticed a physical, old-fashioned printed flyer announcing an appearance by Bridgers at the Liberty, a 400-capacity club, on May 7. No social media post. No press release.
A piece of paper on a wall in a small New Mexico city that happens to be the most famous UFO-adjacent location in American geography.
That show, her first solo performance since opening for Taylor Swift at MetLife Stadium in May 2023, was exactly as low-key as the announcement suggested. Acoustic. Phones off. New songs.
The specific quality of an artist who is not ready to announce a campaign but is ready to play music again for small rooms of people who found out about it from a piece of paper.
She repeated the format across a series of small and medium venues around the country — phone-free, acoustic, the new material road-tested without the pressure of it being officially presented.
The shows accumulated, the audience grew, the new songs circulated in the way that songs circulate when phones are not allowed and memory and emotion have to do the work of transmission.
By the time she arrived at Madison Square Garden on Thursday for the conclusion of the pop-up run, she was playing a sold-out arena with eight new songs and an audience that had been waiting for her specifically.
The MSG show was acoustic like the others. The phones-off policy held. Eight new songs from a third album that has not been titled or dated. The audience heard them. The tour announcement came the next morning.
The Lost Tour And What The Name Might Mean
The tour's name, The Lost Tour, is doing the specific kind of work that Bridgers's titles tend to do. Stranger in the Alps. Punisher. The Record (for Boygenius). Names that are not self-explanatory but that accumulate meaning as the music they are attached to becomes familiar.
The Lost Tour lands simultaneously as a description of three years of absence, a statement about arrival and perhaps a reference to the specific emotional register that her new songs, if they follow the pattern of everything she has made before, will occupy.
The tour photography was created in collaboration with Gregory Crewdson, the fine art photographer whose work has defined a specific visual vocabulary for twenty years. Crewdson photographs suburban scenes at night, large-format, cinematically lit, depicting the specific quiet dread of ordinary American environments rendered strange by attention and darkness.
If you have seen his work and you have heard Punisher, the collaboration makes complete and immediate sense.
Alex G opens all North American dates. Isaac Wood, the former frontman of Black Country, New Road, whose own solo work has been among the most critically admired British music of recent years, opens the UK and European leg that begins in November.
The Full North American Routing
The Lost Tour begins September 15 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis — a 20,000-capacity arena that represents the scale of how Bridgers's world has changed since the small venues of her early career.
The tour moves through St. Paul at the Grand Casino Arena on September 17, Chicago at United Center on September 19 and Columbus at Nationwide Arena on September 22 before arriving in New York for back-to-back nights at Barclays Center on September 25 and 26.
The double Barclays Center dates are the signal of where demand is concentrated. New York audiences who followed Bridgers from the small venues of her first decade to the sold-out MSG acoustic show on Thursday will have two shots at seeing the full-band show in Brooklyn. Philadelphia follows on September 28 at Xfinity Mobile Arena.
Washington DC follows on September 29 at Capital One Arena. Toronto gets its date on October 1 at Scotiabank Arena. Vancouver closes out the confirmed Canadian dates on October 24 at Rogers Arena.
The UK and European leg begins in November and runs through December, bringing Bridgers back to the markets where Punisher and Boygenius built audiences that she has not played solo for three years.
Who Is Phoebe Bridgers?
Phoebe Bridgers was born in Pasadena in 1994 and spent her teenage years in the Los Angeles music community, the Americana series at the Grand Ole Echo, busking at the Pasadena farmers' market, studying vocal jazz at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, before releasing her debut album Stranger in the Alps in 2017 on Dead Oceans.
The album found a specific audience that recognized something in the quietness of her approach and the precision of her language, lyrics that operate in the key of specificity rather than universality, naming the exact thing rather than the category the thing belongs to.
Punisher in 2020 expanded that audience dramatically. The album arrived in June of a year that had nowhere to go and a lot of feelings to manage, and Bridgers's specific emotional register, the deadpan processing of grief and longing and end-of-the-world anxiety, the melodies that are too pretty for the lyrics they carry, found an audience that was larger than anyone had projected.
Punisher ended up on virtually every significant year-end list and is now discussed as one of the defining albums of its era.
Boygenius, the supergroup she formed with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, was a side project that became its own phenomenon. The Record won multiple Grammys in 2024.
The three of them headlined arenas that Bridgers had been a supporting act at two years earlier. The boygenius hiatus announced in late 2023 left the question of what Bridgers would do next as one of the more widely followed questions in independent music.
The answer was three years of silence and a printed flyer in Roswell, New Mexico, and eight new songs at Madison Square Garden, and The Lost Tour beginning September 15.
General onsale is June 12 at 10 AM local time. Registration closes June 7.
The RAINN Partnership
One dollar from every ticket sold on the North American leg of The Lost Tour will be donated to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization and the operator of the National Sexual Assault Hotline.
The partnership reflects both Bridgers's longstanding advocacy in that area and the specific kind of intentionality that has characterized how she has managed her public presence across her career.
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