Phoebe Bridgers shares ‘On Video,’ written for A24’s ‘Primetime,’ the Robert Pattinson thriller marking her feature acting debut
Phoebe Bridgers has built a decade of songs on restraint, on the sense of something being remembered rather than performed. “On Video” ends in distortion.
The track, shared Thursday (Sept. 25), was written and performed specifically for Primetime, the A24 thriller opening in US cinemas the same day. It plays over the end titles. It also functions as her own exit music, since Bridgers appears in the film, her first substantial role in a feature.
The song is constructed from the inside out. It draws on elements of the original score by Ari Balouzian, opening softly before escalating into heavy, distorted guitar textures and then settling back down. That shape is not decoration. It reproduces the arc of a film that spends nearly two hours tightening without offering anyone relief.
A Song Written From Inside the Film
Most end-credits songs are commissioned at arm’s length, a name attached late to a finished product. Bridgers wrote hers with the composer’s material already in it, and she was on set.
She plays Del Harvey, one of the experienced decoys working for the program at the center of the story. Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut, is set in 2006 and follows the making of the NBC series To Catch a Predator, with Robert Pattinson as host Chris Hansen. Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and Anna Faris also appear. Pattinson produces through his own company, and the screenplay draws on a 2007 Esquire article about the show.
The film premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 5 and arrived with strong notices, an early Rotten Tomatoes score in the low nineties, and immediate awards conversation around Pattinson. In NME’s four-star review, Lou Thomas called Bridgers “convincing despite only brief screen time” and described Pattinson’s Hansen as “a queasy mix of oily and chilling.” The film reaches UK cinemas on Oct. 30.
The Loudest Year of Her Career
“On Video” arrives roughly a month after Lost Weekend, Bridgers’ third solo album and her first since 2020’s Punisher. It became her first solo Number One album in the UK, also topping the Vinyl Albums Chart and the Record Store Chart, and drew a five-star NME review that read the title as a reckoning rather than an escape.
The distortion on “On Video” belongs to that same stretch of work. Bridgers made her name on quiet, on the held breath before a sound rather than the sound itself, and the loudest moments in her catalog have always been earned rather than reached for. Ending a song in noise is a small decision with a lot behind it, particularly when the noise is attached to a story about people who built a career out of watching.
She has already folded it into the live set. Bridgers is currently on the North American leg of her Lost Tour, with UK and European dates later this year including Dublin, Manchester and London, plus a rescheduled run of intimate UK shows in December after she was hospitalised with appendicitis last month.
The film work is not stopping either. She provides a voiceover for Invention 13, the directorial debut of Conor Oberst, her Better Oblivion Community Center collaborator, which premieres at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles on Friday (Sept. 26).
The pipeline running between indie songwriters and A24 is well worn by now, usually in one direction: an artist supplies a song, the film supplies the audience. What makes this different is that Bridgers did both jobs. “On Video” is not a needle drop bolted onto a finished cut. It is written out of the score, performed by someone who was in the room, and placed exactly where an audience has nowhere left to look.
