Phoebe Bridgers is a master of collapse. The 25-year-old California native writes songs for those moments when things fall apart, when language fails, when you long for so much distance that you need a spaceship to reach it. From there, she is able to find a sense of purpose, or at least make a plan. “When I get back I’ll lay around/Then I’ll get up and lay back down,” goes a couplet in “I Know the End,” the closing track of her stunning new album Punisher. Across the song’s two halves, she tethers the anxiety of leaving home to a vivid depiction of an actual apocalypse: lightning crashes, fire rises, people scream. “Yeah, I guess the end is here,” she deadpans. Her delivery is light, insistent—the casual tone you use to convey passing thoughts to the closest person in the room.
While Punisher is only her second full-length collection as a solo artist, Bridgers has already established a distinct worldview. Her songs can be autobiographical—2017’s “Motion Sickness” bluntly described an emotionally abusive relationship with a since-spurned, one-time mentor—but her writing is too self-aware and wide-ranging to feel confessional. It can be sad, but she is also the first to call bullshit on letting one emotion consume her. It’s why she will infuse a track like this album’s “Moon Song,” an otherwise wistful ballad that takes place at a birthday party, with a banal detail (“It’s nautical themed”) or an outright dismissal of art born from tragedy. “We hate ‘Tears in Heaven,’” she sings of Eric Clapton’s autobiographical, once-inescapable ballad. Then she concedes, “But it’s sad that his baby died.”
This impulse toward the candid, the multi-dimensional, has also come to define the sound of Bridgers’ music. Self-produced with Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, these songs are starkly drawn and colorfully embellished, produced in service of each individual story. Punisher’s first single, “Garden Song,” is a marvel not only for how seamlessly its lyrics bind fantasies and nightmares, burning houses and blooming flowers, but also for how each element of its slyly psychedelic arrangement travels along with her words. The fingerpicked riff is played on a guitar that seems to be dissolving; a low, male voice comes in like a record playing at the wrong speed; a steady pulse seems to rise from somewhere deep in your headphones.
Bridgers also writes about this very sensation: the way we hear music, how we devote ourselves to it and form identities around it. On Punisher, these relationships are mostly fraught, from a fan being murdered outside Dodger Stadium to a couple channeling deeper issues through a fight about John Lennon. If music was a pathway toward spiritual catharsis in earlier songs like “Smoke Signals” and “Me & My Dog,” the same drugs don’t work here. Ironically, the most upbeat songs house her bleakest thoughts. “Chinese Satellite,” buoyed by a rushing string arrangement, finds her adrift, desperate for a sign, singing the “same three songs over and over.” And in “Kyoto,” she undercuts a breezy horn section and her most festival-ready chorus by refusing to play along: “I’m a liar,” she sings in its closing line, holding out the syllables so she can’t be misunderstood.