In the press materials for Phoebe Bridgers’ return, the 31-year-old US singer talks about taking time to make her third album after coming to feel “a little world-weary” about public life. Who could blame her? Bridgers became a figure of invasive parasocial behaviour from fans after her spooked, sad second album, 2020’s Punisher, resonated with life under lockdown and made her a superstar. In recent years, young women making introspective and ornate indie-rock songs have risen to startling, pop star levels of fame and scrutiny – and none more so than Bridgers,her Boygenius supergroup with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and their peer Mitski. When Bridgers was rumoured to be engaged in 2022, fans possessed by her devastating music rued her happiness; when she started a new relationship, the gossip mill churned. In 2023, she castigated the so-called fans who aggressed her in an airport while on the way to her father’s funeral.

Even her recent analogue return has prompted reactions that might have a less self-possessed artist wondering why they bother. Last month, mysterious posters started appearing in small towns across the US advertising surprise $1 Bridgers shows in intimate venues later that night, before a concluding gig at New York’s gigantic Madison Square Garden. Phones were banned, along with any kind of recording device, including pen and paper, to stop audience members from writing down lyrics from her third album and sharing them online. The backlash to this – some fans accused her of ableism – prompted its own backlash, a tiresome Russian doll of discourse that’s still dragging on.

More heartening was how determined some fans were about honouring her wishes: the r/phoebebridgers subreddit has been hawkish about deleting excessive descriptions of the new songs. There are no clips of the shows on YouTube. Two other ways you might measure the excitement for the return of a generational songwriter – “she is the reference now,” Taylor Swift told me in 2022 – come in very different forms. There’s so little information available about what she’s up to that Rolling Stone published a behind-the-scenes interview with photographer Gregory Crewdson about how he shot one of her comeback images – not even the album cover. And on Bridgers’ Instagram, two of the top comments on a post announcing her return are from Simon Pegg and the Minions.

Lost Boys, the first song to be released from Bridgers’ third album, also feels a little like a vestige from a pre-smartphone age. Co-produced by Bridgers and her usual crew of Ethan Gruska and Tony Berg – plus pop zelig Jack Antonoff – the ornate fingerpicked guitar and darting woodwinds bring to mind the organic filigrees of Sufjan Stevens circa Michigan and Illinois, with touches of the ramshackle opulence of Alex G, here on additional production. Earnest, intricate and old-fashioned, it’s a rugged upgrade from Bridgers’ trademark silvery sound – one that changed pop, from Swift’s Folklore to Gracie Abrams’ trembling songcraft, and left fans wondering what she might do to evolve away from that. The rattling chime of the production builds to the most room-filling, satisfying chorus Bridgers has ever written: “Lost boys never grow up, never grow old,” she sings, with rhapsodic warmth, backed by her Boygenius bandmates.

The verses contrast a youth spent in the army decades ago with maybe a different kind of romantic deserter, moving from East Berlin, military-issue haircuts and kids being given rifles to wondering about the future with a lover who immediately skips out on it. Obsessive fans will be scouring for clues to work out who it’s about, but multiplicity of Lost Boys resists boring detective work: how it flashes between memory and the future, intimacy and estrangement, Bridgers’ perspective and others, as much anthem as lament. At least, from the whirlwind crescendo to that misty voice – and the unavoidable presence of ghosts – there’s absolutely no doubting who it’s by.