Review: Phoebe Bridgers’s Punisher Gorgeously Simmers with Impending Doom

The singer addresses a generation resistant to defining itself against a backdrop of perpetual catastrophe.

Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
Photo: Frank Ockenfels

Throughout her sophomore effort, Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers is often transfixed by a feeling of stasis. Songs like “Chinese Satellite” and “I See You” evoke the sensation of being frozen, exacerbated by the perpetual anticipation of doom. “I’ve been running in circles trying to be myself,” she sings on the former. Again and again over the course of Punisher, the singer-songwriter laments her inability to find solid ground, her voice low but certain. These songs simmer beautifully and quietly, eventually boiling over in intermittent moments of sonic boisterousness, and the results are often stunning.

The album’s first two songs, “Garden Song” and “Kyoto,” perfectly illustrate this dynamic. Musically, “Garden Song” sounds tense and distant, with a light and bouncy guitar turned all the way down in the mix, while the unabashedly jaunty and bright “Kyoto” nearly bursts at the seams, every element clear and pristine. The restraint of “Garden Song” helps “Kyoto” hit harder and peak higher. And all the while, Bridgers’s breathy but confident voice remains the focal point of the track: “When I grow up, I’m going to look up from my phone,” she sings with certainty, “and it’s going to be just like my recurring dream.”

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Elsewhere, Bridgers addresses a generation resistant to defining itself against a backdrop of catastrophe. “Halloween” creeps along while the singer muses about ambulance sirens ringing out in the night: “I used to joke that if they woke you up/Somebody better be dying.” Later, when Bridgers draws out the line “Come on, it’s Halloween,” it feels more mournful than celebratory, like a haunted state of being rather than a fun night out with friends. This renders the one seemingly hopeful line—“We can be anything”—sound like a comment on the paralysis that comes with trying to decide which mask to wear.

Punisher’s best songs are those most adept at bringing all of these themes and sounds together. “Chinese Satellite” starts out wispy and ethereal before building to an apex of lush, cinematic strings, booming drums, and keen electric guitars. Here, Bridgers is in peak form as a lyricist, her moments of devastation shot through with a sardonic smile: “I want to believe,” she declares as a myriad of sounds fades away and we’re left with only those serious, dramatic strings. “Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing,” is the punchline, and the moment is jarring compared to what initially feels like a real epiphany.

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Punisher’s closing track, “I Know the End,” is a travelogue at the end of the world, explicitly illustrating the cloud of uneasiness that hangs over the album. Bridgers sprinkles the song with nods toward an amorphous kind of closure: A tornado comes for her hometown, a siren sounds in the distance, government drones and alien spaceships float off in the sky, and a billboard warns that “the end is near” amid a crescendo of horns and explosive noise. The album ends with blood-curdling screams, until all the sound fades out and Bridgers’s voice is hoarse. The end of the world is a central detail on Punisher, an influence over the uncertainty that falls over these dark but gorgeous songs.

Score: 
 Label: Dead Oceans  Release Date: June 19, 2020  Buy: Amazon

Jordan Walsh

Jordan Walsh is a music writer based in Philadelphia. His writing has also appeared in The Alternative and Magnet magazine.

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