A quiet room in Greenwich Village has provided the setting for an unexpected Boygenius reunion. Filmed at the Cherry Lane Theatre under the direction of Lance Oppenheim, a new three-song session finds Phoebe Bridgers stripping back her recent material with help from both familiar collaborators and her bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. The release arrives through A24 as part of its Sound Check program, a series that pairs directors with musicians for unadorned performances inside historic theatre spaces.
Bridgers begins the performance alongside her longtime pianist Ethan Gruska, offering a bare arrangement of On Video. The song was written for the soundtrack to the upcoming feature Primetime, a production that places Bridgers on screen opposite Robert Pattinson. While the film represents her first major acting part, it follows earlier work on screen, including an appearance in a short film helmed by Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst.
The atmosphere changes once Baker and Dacus step up to join Bridgers for two selections from her newest catalog, Haunted and Lost Boys. Their tight three-part harmonies immediately alter the texture of both pieces. While the trio went on hiatus following the promotional run for their 2023 album The Record, an era capped by a performance on Saturday Night Live, Baker and Dacus both contributed to the sessions for Bridgers' recent solo record Lost Weekend. Even so, visual records of the three performing together have been nonexistent since the group paused its schedule.
Concertgoers in New York did get a brief preview late last month when Baker and Dacus walked out during Bridgers' headlining set to perform Not Strong Enough and Powers. Because Bridgers enforces a strict phone-free policy across the entire tour, however, no audience video escaped into the wild. Oppenheim's film stands as the lone visual evidence of the trio sharing a stage during this album campaign.
The film arrives in the middle of a dense period for Bridgers, who has been crossing the United States on her Lost Tour. Lost Weekend is her first solo full-length since Punisher arrived in 2020, and the release earned Bridgers her first solo Number One album. She received the chart news while resting in a hospital bed, an early sign of the physical strain that has shadowed parts of this run.
Before the official tour kicked off in Indiana on September 15, Bridgers tested out smaller, unannounced environments. In August, she played a pair of phone-free dates at London's Union Chapel to mark her 32nd birthday, followed by an impromptu acoustic set inside Madison Square Garden. The main domestic leg has since taken her through rooms in Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, and Michigan.
Health concerns have continued to force quick logistical changes. Bridgers was hospitalized again this week, prompting the cancellation of three intimate solo dates in Kingston, Brighton, and Bristol. Those appearances have already been rescheduled, but her calendar leaves very little downtime. Once she completes the remaining North American stops, Bridgers travels abroad next month for an extensive tour across the UK and Ireland, which will lead straight into seven dates through mainland Europe. Amid such an unrelenting itinerary, the quiet moments captured at Cherry Lane feel like a deliberate breath, framed by the harmonies that made the trio so compelling in the first place.
