Phoebe Bridgers Fights at the End of This World

On her sophomore album, Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers confirms the end of this world and looks beyond it.

Punisher is an album for the perpetual end of the world. Phoebe Bridgers’ sophomore album matures past the sinking darkness of Stranger in the Alps, and positions us at the repeated apocalypse with a vision beyond it. 

The album opens with “DVD Menu,” an ominous instrumental that’s foreboding but somehow soothingly nostalgic. “Garden Song” follows, framing the album’s start and finish. The first words she sings are, “Some day, I’m gonna live,” and from there the song unfolds into a road map for what exists on the other side of the apocalypse. Bridgers sings, “I grew up here / ‘Til it all went up in flames.” The “here” she sings about could be any individual hometown darkness, but there’s an emphasis on growing up, on getting taller, on every day seeing the world in slightly sharper focus.

The evils of the places that raised us have always existed, but as we grow, the sanitized narratives we’ve been given are lit aflame. At the end, she sings, “No, I’m not afraid of hard work / I get everything I want / I have everything I wanted,” and this reminds us throughout the rest of the album that this is our final destination. After the fighting, we will have a bed of roses. 

Punisher sharpens and broadens her debut album, Stranger in the Alps. That album is a solemn, indie record where songs melt into each other with little distinction between them, but on Punisher, Bridgers pushes her range. “Kyoto” is Bridgers’ most upbeat song to date, with horns expanding its triumph, though she matches that musical mood with lyrics that depict dissatisfaction and imposter syndrome. Her self-deprecating sarcasm comes through in the outro where she sings, “Guess I lied / I’m a liar / Who lies / ‘Cause I’m a liar.”

The lyrics on Punisher maintain Bridgers’ nihilistic tendencies, but they introduce a plea to be proven wrong. “Chinese Satellite” shows the stunning contradictions of loving someone through existential cynicism, which is where Bridgers finds her stride. She sings, “I want to believe / Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing.” She speaks of a lover arguing with Evangelicals, and of her disbelief with their beliefs, of not believing that anything happens after we die. She then sings, “But you know I’d stand on a corner / Embarrassed with a picket sign / If it meant I would see you / When I died,” and shows how simple a conversion can be. There’s a maturity here in recognizing your own knee-jerk nihilism, and then still admitting you’d buy in too for the right person and the right hope.

The last song, “I Know The End,” is where everything comes to emphatic culmination. The song begins with soft, swirling synths, and it feels as though it will be a typical Bridgers’ indie introspective. She then sings “I gotta go now / I know, I know, I know” and the tempo switches. The song builds from that moment, and she begins to list details, like “some America-first rap-country song / A slaughterhouse, an outlet mall / Slot machines, fear of God” as well as low-hanging storms, government drones, and alien spaceships in order to paint a picture of millennial dystopian Americana.

But instead of running from this, she faces it as an inevitability, singing, “Either way, we’re not alone / I’ll find a new place to be from.” The instruments swell and become orchestrated chaos. Each instrument seems as though it’s trying to be the loudest, horns blaring, symbols clashing, guitars squealing, all going right up against each other. As they increase in volume and speed, all politely competing, Bridgers finally screams over it all at the top of her lungs for as long as she can. It’s a catharsis that brings me to tears each time, a full surrender to the building chaos surrounding her. The instruments then die down, and the only thing we hear is her faint whisper-screaming, where she’s coughing and laughing through the last bits of sound she can force out. Here, we hear the fight in her throat, and we hear her laughing through it, too.

Punisher outlines the horror and mundanity of growing up when the future seems to be crumbling under your feet and before your eyes. Phoebe Bridgers is 25, and she captures the perfect balance of millennial angst and sarcasm. Her lyrics don’t take themselves too seriously, but they acknowledge how fucked we all are. For those of us coming into adulthood at this moment, the future feels particularly desolate. The environment is on the brink of irreparable harm while the government has shown no sufficient action or interest in changing its trajectory. Capitalism continues to rip apart everything in its path, while mass incarceration and violence at the hands of the state are constantly granted further visibility and legitimacy. There’s no secure path to health insurance while we’re in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic, and the government seems wholly uninterested in listening to us. The future shreds itself, drifting further from reach, and it’s hard to feel like this is anything other than the end. But on top of this, we fall in love, we fall out of love, we cope with jokes at our own expense and still find space to be optimistic. We are screaming at the end of the world, and then working to find out what comes after that.

Phoebe Bridgers writes these complexities with appropriate humor and gravity. Punisher paints a picture of the end of this world, but she seems hopeful that a different world exists on this one’s horizon. The world we grew up with is gone, up in flames, but one day we will live in a new one. On “I Know The End” she sings, “No, I’m not afraid to disappear / The billboard said ‘the end is near’ / I turned around, there is nothing there / Yeah I guess the end is here.”