Phoebe Bridgers celebrates her UK number one from her hospital bed

Phoebe Bridgers' third solo album has topped the UK chart, but the news comes right after an emergency appendectomy on her birthday, of all days. The American singer-songwriter has reached the top of the UK Chart for the first time in her career with "Lost Weekend", released a week ago. It's also a historic achievement for Secretly Group, the American independent label that put out the record, which had never previously managed to reach the top spot in the UK.
The songwriter's new work features numerous collaborations, from Jack Antonoff to Alex G, from Bo Burnham to Cameron Winter of Geese, as well as Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, her bandmates in Boygenius. It's an album in which folk, ambient, country and electronic music intertwine with everyday chronicles and hallucinated visions.

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The week of the album's release, however, turned into something of a personal odyssey for Phoebe. On the very day of her 32nd birthday, Bridgers was hospitalized and operated on for appendicitis, a circumstance that forced her to postpone some intimate shows scheduled in England to accompany the record's release. "For my birthday I got appendicitis", she joked on social media. Taylor Swift, meanwhile, had dedicated an enthusiastic message to her: "It's her birthday, but she's the one who gave us a gift with this record. I can't stop listening to it: it's a triumph from every point of view".
The prediction proved correct. When she received the news of her number one spot on the British chart, Bridgers was still in the hospital, hooked up to an IV drip. Naturally, she couldn't resist a self-deprecating comment on social media: "My album is number one on the UK chart and I burst". A decidedly unusual way to celebrate the first number one of her career.

In the six years since her second album, "Punisher", the American artist has caught a wave of success, going from cult musician to mainstream phenomenon thanks to winning three Grammys with the Boygenius project alongside Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus.
Fame comes at a price, and Phoebe Bridgers has known both the joys and the sorrows of becoming famous: on one hand, countless collaboration requests from celebrated artists; on the other, a daily life marked by family troubles – including the recent death of her father, who had been gravely ill – and personal ones, such as the end of her complicated relationship with Paul Mescal.
"Lost Weekend" breaks a silence that lasted over a year, long enough that some suspected she'd retired from music altogether. It's a third difficult album that digs its hands into the potential gossip fodder of social media, one the artist tackles with a poetic and literary awareness and sensitivity worthy of a true songwriting master. Vulnerable, prickly and at times even challenging, Bridgers' music is emotionally ambiguous. The melodies remain suspended, steering clear of the kind of crowd-pleasing refrains that grab instant empathy.

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