About

The biting emo-folk of Phoebe Bridgers’ 2017 Stranger in the Alps established the singer-songwriter as a woeful wisecracker. Bridgers was a millennial Warren Zevon who, even if she sang about sexting instead of heroin withdrawal, shared the shrewd Seventies songwriter’s penchant for fictionalizing their own death and chronicling perpetual L.A. decay. “Nothing’s changed,” as Bridgers put it dimly on her debut, “L.A.’s all right.” 

Like Zevon, Bridgers also emerged with an uncanny knack for pop songcraft and classic American songbook melody, a dexterity she spent the next three years refining until it seemed that her artistic evolution could explode in any direction: In her more produced moments (“Motion Sickness”), it was not hard to imagine Bridgers as a synth-pop frontwoman; In Better Oblivion Community Center, her group with Conor Oberst, she mastered breezy roots-rock; In Boygenius, her band with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, she offered grunge-pop and pastoral folk; In collaborations with arena headliners like the National and the 1975, Bridgers neatly played the role of soon-to-be alt-rock popstar.  

And so the most radical element of Punisher, the songwriter’s long awaited new record, might be that Phoebe Bridgers merely wants to remain the fully-formed artist she already is. At first glance, her second solo album feels a whole lot like her first: Eleven expertly rendered, largely downcast songs about broken faith, desperate, occasionally self-destructive love, and tenuous recovery. At the end of the first chorus of “Kyoto,” the sole up-tempo moment on the record, she lets out a playfully unconvincing ‘Woo!,” as if to make it clear that Bridgers is, at most, a reluctant rocker. Punisher is more sure of itself than its predecessor, thanks to Bridgers’ sharpened and studied songwriting.

If Punisher proves anything, it’s that whatever comes next for Bridgers, whether it’s making sense of her generation’s dark future that lays ahead, or finding ever-new ways to mythologize her own sadness, she’ll be more than well equipped. “Either way, we’re not alone,” as she sings in the album’s final notes, “I’ll find a new place to be from.” — (via Rolling Stone)

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Label: Dead Oceans
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Repress
Country: UK & US
Released: 2022
Genre: Rock, Folk, World, & Country
Style: Indie Rock, Folk
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File under: Alternative / Indie / Folk