Phoebe Bridgers is bringing The Lost Tour to Barclays Center for three nights this week, but the most radical production choice may happen before she plays a note. The Brooklyn shows will be device-free, requiring phones, cameras and smart watches to be secured in Yondr pouches for the duration of the concert.

Bridgers plays Barclays Center Sept. 24, 25 and 26 at 7:30 p.m., with Alex G opening. The three-night stand gives one of indie rock’s most influential songwriters an arena platform while asking an audience trained to document concerts to experience the evening without producing its own parallel archive.

That restriction is unusually well matched to Bridgers’ music. Her songs reward close listening and often depend on the unstable distance between a nearly conversational vocal and a sudden surge of sound. A phone held at eye level can turn that dynamic into content before it has finished becoming experience. Removing the screen changes not just etiquette but attention.

Bridgers has spent much of her career making intimacy scalable. Her songs can contain tiny domestic details, black humor and dread while opening into arrangements capable of filling very large rooms. That combination helped move a style associated with bedrooms, clubs and theaters into festival fields and arenas without requiring the writing to become generic.

Barclays Center presents the obvious challenge. An arena is good at spectacle and less naturally suited to silence. Quiet songs can make a big room feel enormous in the wrong way, exposing every cough and beer run. But when an audience cooperates, the opposite can happen: 15,000 people listening closely can create a concentration unavailable in a smaller, noisier club.

A room without screens

Alex G is a particularly coherent choice as opener. His records share Bridgers’ interest in distorted Americana, oblique character writing and arrangements that can move from homemade fragility to unnerving force. The pairing is not a matter of two artists sounding identical. It is a shared willingness to let beautiful surfaces coexist with things that feel damaged underneath.

The device-free policy adds another layer because Bridgers’ audience is intensely online. Fan communities have helped songs, performances and fragments of personality circulate at extraordinary speed. Asking that community to stop recording for a few hours is not a rejection of fandom. It is an experiment in what fandom feels like when its evidence has to be memory.

There is an economic dimension, too. Contemporary tours often depend on social media clips to extend a show far beyond the ticket holders in the room. Every audience member can become an unpaid camera operator for the artist’s cultural presence. A phone-free concert deliberately gives up some of that circulation in exchange for scarcity. The show belongs, temporarily, to the people who were there.

That scarcity used to be ordinary. Before smartphones, most concerts disappeared except for professional recordings, bootlegs and recollection. The return to that condition can now feel luxurious. It permits mistakes to vanish and surprises to remain surprises. It also makes the audience responsible for paying attention because there will be no personal video to consult later.

Phoebe Bridgers’ The Lost Tour, with Alex G, plays Barclays Center Sept. 24 through Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m. The shows are device-free. This is a preview based on announced event information, not a review of a performance.

The policy also changes the visual character of the room. At most arena concerts, hundreds of glowing rectangles rise as soon as a recognizable song begins. Without them, sightlines improve and the audience becomes visible to itself. That may sound cosmetic, but concert behavior is partly contagious. People respond differently when everyone around them appears to be watching the stage rather than framing it.

Bridgers has always written effectively about the distance between public performance and private feeling. An arena full of people voluntarily giving up their cameras is therefore more than a logistical quirk. It puts unusual pressure on the songs themselves, which have to create the memory rather than merely accompany its recording.

The three Brooklyn performances begin at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 24 through 26, with Alex G opening. Anyone going should account for the extra time involved in securing a device on entry and unlocking it afterward.