Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Punisher’ is the perfect fit for a terrifying future
You can plan all you want for a certain scenario, only for everything to go up in smoke and leave your preparations on the sidelines shrugging their shoulders. Occasionally, though, the smoke and rubble is the exact thing you didn’t realise you needed.
A June release for Phoebe Bridgers’ sophomore album Punisher seemed a little out of sync with what we’ve learned about the Californian from her debut Stranger in the Alps and her wider presence. In short, ‘summery’ isn’t the first word you’d associate with her oeuvre.
However, in a world defined equally by forced stasis and nervous uncertainty, it’s hard to think of a more perfect backdrop.
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“Somewhere in Germany but I can’t place it/Man, I hate this part of Texas,” Bridgers sings in the opening to album closer ‘I Know the End’, painting the ongoing battle between certainty and confusion which permeates not just the album itself but the America into which it has been thrown.
Bridgers released the album a day early, encouraging fans to donate to one of a number of causes before listening on their chosen platform, as if to remind both us and herself how different things look to the period in which the songs were written and the music was recorded.
The 25-year-old has been consistently vocal on social justice causes, giving us confidence this all comes from a place of long-held conviction, and you get the sense that the noise (or relative lack thereof) around the release is less an internal battle and more a sense of absolute certainty that this is what she should be doing.
We’re still being treated to the usual spread of reviews and write-ups, but you feel Bridgers would feel uncomfortable making the news cycle more about her and her music than it absolutely needs to be. Sure, the idea of there being more important things going on elsewhere is nothing new, but it rightly feels louder and more permanent now.
“I used to joke that if they woke you up somebody better be dying,” she sings on ‘Halloween’, performed with long-time collaborator Conor Oberst. At this stage, it’s hard to conceive of undisturbed sleep in any form.
Bridgers’ collaborations form a big part of this album, just as they have done in her earlier work.
In between the two solo albums, she put out Better Oblivion Community Center, a self-titled album from her side-project with Oberst, and an EP with boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
All three join her for the album closer, a sprawling, building track which remains compact while feeling grander if not longer than its sub-six-minute running time. While there are shades of Oberst’s band Bright Eyes in the play-out, with the leaving a bar at sunrise confusion of their track ‘Easy/Lucky/Free’ the closest comparison, Punisher as a whole owes just as much to Baker and Dacus in its blend of slow-burn growth and nihilism.
Baker’s lyric “wish I could write songs about anything other than death” comes to mind, even if Bridgers bats against the urge by imploring us to justify a scenario in this world which calls for anything other than such a focus.
Curiously, this goes beyond the material of the lyrics and music, with ‘ICU’, a song title pun evoking one of the bleakest and most death-defined episodes of recently-concluded show BoJack Horseman, renamed for its single release with the singer-songwriter explaining the change with the simple line ‘*gestures at entire world*’.
There are so many powerful lines across Punisher to make it tough to identify just one as representative of both the album itself and the world into which it has been thrown, full of avoidable death and wanton cruelty, but “We spent what was left of our serotonin” comes close.
The utterance, towards the end of penultimate track ‘Graceland Too,’ is pertinent in its positioning as much as its material. While on the surface level it can be read as little more than a recollection of an MDMA experience, it simultaneously points to a finite amount of energy which must be rationed out for the fear of what’s around the corner: in this instance it’s a repeated acknowledgement, in the final track, that “the end is near”.
It’s as if Bridgers has slowed down in anticipation of one final push, conserving energy in recognition that we’re no longer at a point where we can expect patterns to continue in any predictable sense but still can’t hold back anything extra because life itself has taken too much of a toll. We can pinpoint the reasons for our struggle, but even the closest introspection won’t reveal anything tangible to be gained from taking a step back or taking things easy.
Ultimately, though, you can forgive a marathon runner for getting a helping hand on their way across the finish line when the complete picture is more beautiful than any doctored story of a hero going it alone could ever be.
