This week, indie star Phoebe Bridgers releases her long-awaited third album, six years since her pandemic-era breakthrough. Alongside a slew of glittering reviews for Lost Weekend, including five stars from the Guardian, with it comes her first solo charting single in the UK – although the Californian musician’s influence runs far deeper than reviews or record sales could measure. Just how did a RuneScape-referencing, Halloween-costumed Berklee drop-out become the most influential songwriter of the 2020s?

Bridgers’ idiosyncratic writing has shaped the sound of the decade. Her second album Punisher, released in June 2020 (and recorded many months before), spookily anticipated that strange, lonely year: in her eerie double-tracked vocals (a nod to Bridgers’ musical hero, Elliott Smith), Bridgers sang of empty shopping malls and conspiracy theories over lush, unsettling music made from watery electric guitar, Mellotron, strings, screams and birdsong. Today, Bridgers’ distinctive mix of dry wit and pathos is traceable in the lyrics of pop’s new chart toppers, such as Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams, while heavyweights across generations and genres, including Paul McCartney, Taylor Swift and SZA, have clamoured for collaborations. “She is the reference now,” Swift told the Guardian in 2022.

“She’s the voice of a really particular moment,” says author Carmen Maria Machado, who first met Bridgers when she attended an event for Machado’s prize-winning memoir In the Dream House. There is a kinship between Machado’s prose and Bridgers’ lyrics – both are candid, haunted, unafraid to get gruesome – and it resulted in Machado publishing a short story to accompany Punisher. “Phoebe’s never looking directly on, rather looking askance,” says Machado. “Her music is so precise and weird and beautiful; it’s a prayer or an ode to this place that we’re living in, while also watching it fall apart.”

Reviews for Lost Weekend have highlighted the album’s deeply personal subject matter – it discusses the death of Bridgers’ father, and the end of her engagement to actor Paul Mescal – but also Bridgers’ enduringly surreal sense of humour. When performing single Lost Boys on the Tonight Show, she played it first with a band of children, who were fizzing with excitement, and then again in an acoustic arrangement with veteran folk legend Dan Reeder. The effect was trippy, sweet and faintly morbid: distinctly Phoebe.

For Naomi McPherson, a member of synth-pop three-piece Muna, it’s this mixture of matter-of-fact and magical that makes Bridgers so distinct. “It’s infuriating and inspiring how good she is,” McPherson says, pointing to a forthcoming Lost Weekend song with a line about turning down the stereo volume to better parallel park: “To be able to put that in a song in a way that isn’t stupid, but is actually brilliant and somehow deeply touching, is an enormous feat.”

Muna signed to Bridgers’ record label Saddest Factory in 2021, joining a cohort of imaginative, predominantly queer musicians united under Bridgers’ mentality of “getting cool stuff out to people as fast as possible”. Singer-songwriter Claud (whose song A Good Thing soundtracked the finale to queer romance series Heartstopper) was the label’s first signee. They emphasise the value of Bridgers’ support at a vital time for both artists: “I knew I could trust her opinions and instincts for my project, because I love everything she does with hers.”

The label was rolled into parent company Dead Oceans earlier this year after a trademark dispute, but its lasting influence reflects Bridgers’ determination to change the music industry for the better – as did her supergroup, Boygenius, formed with songwriter friends Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. Together the trio played their biggest stages to date and clinched three Grammy awards, while Bridgers took the award ceremony as an opportunity to condemn former Recording Academy boss Neil Portnow, who had been accused of sexual assault, for his disparaging “step up” comment towards women in music: “Rot in piss!”

Bridgers’ plain-talking has won her a passionate fanbase, many of whom are easily spotted by their matching ghost tattoos – a reference to the cover of her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps – and her concerts are intense: Claud, who has toured with Bridgers, describes “crowds of tens of thousands where you can actually hear a pin drop”. It tracks, then, that Bridgers decided to promote Lost Weekend not with sit-down interviews but a series of secretive pop-up shows across the US, taking the new songs straight to fans.

Fan Baleigh Epperly, an environmental advocate, DJ and co-founder of queer, female-led local DJ collective Their House, “freaked out” when Bridgers rolled in to play at the Loud, a 500-capacity venue in her home town of Huntington, West Virginia. “We never get shit,” she laughs, saying it meant “everything” that Bridgers was visiting “the overlooked places, the places where she knows her fans are”.

The tiny shows were first come, first served, capped at $50 a ticket, and mobile-phone free. Epperly says they all sat cross-legged, watching Bridgers play as if it were a house show. “It was the talk of the town, literally,” she marvels, predicting that the performance will have a lasting impact on young musicians who may have internalised damaging stereotypes about Appalachia: “If Phoebe is good enough for West Virginia, then you’re good enough to play here, to live here, to be from here.”

Muna’s Katie Gavin describes Bridgers’ influence in similar terms. “She’s an aspirational songwriter for me. Seeing her make art makes me want to do it, which is what the best music does.”