Dream Team

The new Phoebe Bridgers’ album, Lost Weekend, may very well be the best record of 2026. It’s the two songs on which she collaborates with Cameron Winter - “Kill Me” and “I Can’t Wait” - that blew my socks off. Wow. A dream team if there ever was one!

“Kill Me” opens with the familiar: a warm folk guitar, Phoebe’s hushed vocals. But the mood shifts at the chorus, with the lyric “This is gonna kill me” followed by a pause and the syncopated, “Wait”. Twice

we are offered a crescendo of anticipation, only to return to another, soft verse, with lyrics like the exquisitely bitter, “He kissed me hello/he tastes like a flower with chemical petals”.

With one minute left to the four-minute song, you think you’ve settled in. But, no: a key change, a 6/8 feel takes over, and this time the crescendo comes to fruition with a fortissimo, distorted bass on one, a grandiose, heavy metal bridge toward the song’s conclusion.

Cameron Winter’s voice enters: “Tamam Shud”, he sings, in the wobbly, fascinating, perfection we’ve come to admire. It turns out this is a Persian phrase meaning “It is ended”. Pheobe alternates with “Let’s go missing”, and then “Listen, listen”, silence.

“I Can’t Wait” is a synth-pop vibe centered around a pulsing, ostinato tonic. The lyrics begin with the lighthearted, “Baby if you leave me/Can you take me with you?/I can sit in the back seat”.

Once again, halfway through the song, just when you think you’ve settled in, the unexpected occurs: the twang of a country/western-style duet featuring our very own dream team:

All my life

Side by side

Hyde Jekyll, Hyde

Finally together

You can change your mind

But you can’t change mine

Hyde Jekyll, hide

You and I forever