"Punisher" by Phoebe Bridgers

 On her latest album Punisher (June 18, 2020), Phoebe Bridgers strikes a brilliant balance between the heavy and the humorous. Musically and lyrically, she fluctuates between the two so often that they become completely intertwined, leaving us with an album that is at once melancholy, amusing, and hopeful. I always have a deep appreciation for artists who take weighty topics and build songs that feel approachable and exciting in spite of the emotional intensity of their content. Throughout Punisher, Bridgers does exactly that.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent acts of violent racism, Bridgers has navigated the release of her music during these past few months carefully. Punisher was scheduled for release on June 19, but Bridgers released it a day early. On Instagram on June 18, she posted a picture of the record with the caption, “I’m not pushing the record until things go back to ‘normal’ because I don’t think they should. Here it is a little early. Abolish the police. Hope you like it.” The link to listen to the album first directed fans to donate to one of eight organizations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Additionally, Bridgers changed “ICU” (a darkly humorous reference to intensive care units) to “I See You” in light of the global pandemic when releasing it as a single on May 19 (though the song retains its stylized title on the tracklisting of the album). “ICU”/“I See You” was written with—and is about—her drummer, best friend, and former boyfriend Marshall Vore. It kicks off with a crescendo of percussion and electric guitars and proceeds to be one of the most energetic songs on the album.

The title track, “Punisher,” is about Bridgers’s love for Elliott Smith and her awareness that she would have been a “punisher”—music slang for a fan who spends too long talking with an artist—herself if she had met him. (Smith died in 2003; Bridgers was nine years old and had not yet discovered his music.) Smith is renowned for double-tracking his vocals, and Bridgers is open about the influence his music has had on her own. Her vocals are beautiful and complex throughout Punisher as she harmonizes with herself, using multiple layers of her voice to fill out the songs.

The album has a number of musical cameos as well. Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus—Bridgers’s bandmates from boygenius—feature on “Graceland Too,” an indie-folk ballad that is similar stylistically to her first album, Stranger In The Alps. On “Garden Song,” Bridgers sings with her UK tour manager, Jeroen, who mirrors Bridgers’s melody in a rich voice two octaves lower than her own. When the two were singing together in the tour van, Bridgers noted his vocal resemblance to Matt Berninger of The National (with whom Bridgers released a duet, “Walking On A String,” in 2019). Jeroen’s backing vocals are a notable contribution to the album, highlighting the light, floating quality of Bridgers’s voice through the contrasting, shadowy quality of his deep bass.

“Kyoto” is one of my favorite tracks because of Bridgers’s witty lyrics and fluty instrumentals. The song, Bridgers has said, is largely about imposter syndrome, but the lyrics carry traces of her difficult relationship with her father as well. After mentioning her younger brother, Bridgers sings a lyric that is one of my favorites on the album for its combination of humor and poignancy: “He said you called on his birthday / You were off by like ten days / But you get a few points for tryin’.” Bridgers has said that she initially wrote “Kyoto” as a ballad but decided to speed it up because she got sick of recording slow songs. The impact of lines such as “I’m gonna kill you / If you don’t beat me to it” are somewhat neutralized by the song’s up-tempo nature. Bridgers sings with conviction, but a bright trumpet in the background downplays the severity of what she is saying.

Bridgers’s ability to create beauty out of juxtaposition is one of her greatest strengths throughout Punisher. Her lyrics have the ability to ground listeners with their specificity and current relevance, allowing us to feel as though we are right there with her in certain scenes or moments of each song. In the final track, “I Know The End,” Bridgers describes seeing a Space X launch on a drive to northern California and how she and everyone were convinced it was “a government drone or an alien spaceship.” At the end of the third verse, she mentions a billboard that said “The End Is Near” before launching into her anthemic refrain, “the end is here.” Just over a minute from the end of Punisher, Bridgers and the many others who worked on the album all let out a collective scream. It is a dramatic and startling close to the album both musically and emotionally. (Personally, I was terrified when the screaming kicked in during my first listen, but now that I know when to anticipate it, I can listen to “I Know The End” without fearing the song’s ending.) At the very end of the track, following the screaming, we hear Bridgers breathing heavily and perhaps laughing quietly to herself. The inclusion of this sound reveals the constructedness of the expression of horror so that Punisher ends with Bridgers giving us insight into how it was all created. “I Know The End” is my favorite song on Punisher because of the way it turns the fear and dread that many of us are experiencing these days into something beautiful and artistic. As on the entire album, Bridgers’s voice is strong and empowering, even in the song’s most vulnerable moments. “I Know The End” feels representative of the tone of Punisher as a whole: it is melancholy and despairing, but it is also clever, self-aware, and full of hope.

– Julia Adamo