Name: Primetime
Director: Lance Oppenheim

Phoebe Bridgers has written her first original song for a film’s end credits, and she chose a film about people being filmed. ‘On Video’ closes Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s A24 drama about the To Catch a Predator phenomenon, a film in which Bridgers also makes her acting debut as Del Harvey, one of the show’s decoys.

That double role is what makes the song worth hearing closely. Bridgers spends the film on the bait side of the hidden camera, then takes the last word over the credits with a lyric about watching someone who has no idea they are being recorded. “I saw you making angels in the snow / Watching you like a common criminal / On video,” she sings, and the line reads differently once the audience has just sat through a story about exactly that kind of looking.

This is not the hushed Bridgers of her early records. The track opens soft and distorted, then builds into dense, grungy guitar riffs that borrow elements from Ari Balouzian’s original score. The official credits read like a small summit: Bridgers wrote it with Christian Lee Hutson and Jack Antonoff, and the producers include Antonoff, Ethan Gruska, Marshall Vore and Tony Berg. Godflesh’s Justin K Broadrick plays bass and electric guitar, Caroline Shaw adds harpsichord, viola and vocals, and Alex G is credited as additional producer.

The song lands only weeks after Lost Weekend, her third solo album and her first since Punisher, a record that debuted at No. 2 on the Official Irish Albums Chart and pulled in collaborators such as Antonoff, Alex G, Bo Burnham, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. Oppenheim is not a new partner either. He directed her video for ‘Lost Boys’, which makes Primetime feel less like a one-off casting stunt and more like the next step of a working relationship.

The limits are built into the format. An end-credits song depends on audiences staying in their seats, and Primetime is only on US screens for now. Early streaming interest is modest, with around 9,200 Last.fm listeners in its first days, a small crowd for an artist whose album is still fresh. There is also the source material. The film starts from an Esquire investigation titled ‘Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die’, and the show it portrays drew lasting criticism over its methods. A song asking who the real voyeur is sits on ground the film itself still has to answer for.

Bridgers has been candid about how unlikely the acting turn felt. “It was certainly super intimidating and when Lance asked me, I was like, ‘No way,’” she said, as quoted by Billboard, adding that working with a cast led by Robert Pattinson, who plays Chris Hansen, alongside Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo, turned out “so fun and free”.

‘On Video’ was released on September 25, the same day Primetime opened in US cinemas after its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. UK and Irish audiences get the film on October 30, and no other territories have confirmed dates yet. Bridgers has already started playing the song live on The Lost Tour, her first full-band solo run since 2023, beginning with a show in Chicago.

The tour’s North American leg with Alex G runs through November 1. The European leg follows with Isaac Wood and Anaïs in support, including two sold-out nights at Dublin’s 3Arena on November 23 and 24; no Latin American or Asian dates have been announced. On several of those European stops, fans will hear the song before the film it was written to close has a release date in their country.

Tags: a24, Soundtrack, Phoebe Bridgers, indie rock, Primetime, On Video

Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘On Video’ closes A24’s Primetime with a song about being watched

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