Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

June 18, 2020 - Dead Oceans

To face the horror of meaninglessness is the ultimate coming of age. Awakening to the big picture existence paints you on the path you’ll take the rest of your life, one where your childhood expectations for the world will always remain at odds with the input you collect from it in real time. 

All will get to this crossroads. A few will choose to stop there. Most will take escape pathways to try and forget their lack of control in the fight—following directional signs that point to love, parenthood, religion, the American Dream, the pursuit of meaning. A few others will take a photo of the signpost and pin it to the corner of their vision before they move forward down a path of their choosing. Then they will just be, progressing, feeling, learning, existing, all while knowing that their existence doesn’t actually belong to them. 

This ability to hold the big picture and the present picture in their field of vision at the same time is what gives artists capacity to teach us more about ourselves. And LA-based singer-songwriter wunderkind Phoebe Bridgers is an excellent teacher. Like her previous solo work, her new album Punisher is strikingly self-aware. She unzips her torso and opens her arms wide for the world to see her insides. The act isn’t just for us though. She’s looking too with curiosity at what lies beneath the skin she clothes herself in, what’s underneath what she thinks experience is. 

It’s not an easy journey to accompany her on. Punisher will break your heart with Bridgers’ brutally raw imagery and objective perspective in laying bare her own experiential observations. The connections she makes between visceral moments in her memory tell her stories with emotive specificity, which contrasts with the whispered restraint of her soft voice and the unembellished delivery of the imagery. She explores an impressively complex emotional space on this album, covering everything from abusive relationships to the meaninglessness of having everything to a desperate desire for faith to dead relationships being carried around like the mass-produced teddy bears you want to believe to life. You keep hugging, but it never hugs you back.   

Punisher drops beautiful emo-folk full of angst and honesty into our current pool of collective turmoil, and the result is majestic. That’s also due in part to the collaborative nature of the album. In addition to producers Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska, Bridgers worked with a gaggle of other artists, some of which you hear occasionally singing with her, including Conor Oberst, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Jim Keltner, Christian Lee Hutson, and Blake Mills. I know I’m a sucker for sad music, but I think that’s just because the sad music teaches me more than the flightiness of happy songs. I was never one for small talk or shallow creek walking anyway. 

Bridgers is a voice in an entire generation of optimistic nihilists. When you are given access to everything at the cost of giving everything back openly and willingly, and it all still isn’t enough to sleep, nihilism is the clear coping mechanism. Life throws itself at you, wakes you up in the night with fears bigger than you can understand, and you have to stare those fears in the face with direct eye contact, say “so what?” and keep moving forward anyway. The only choice is to be or not to be. ☔