Phoebe Bridger’s punisher: A 5-year retrospective
Everyone remembers where they were when Punisher came out, if only because we were all at home.
I was at my mother’s house, having unexpectedly spent my final weeks as a university student drenched in suburbia, frequenting many of the places that Punisher describes. Not Kyoto or Memphis or the California coastline, but I certainly spent a lot of time in parking lots (for Phoebe, it was a Goodwill with her brother, for me, my old high school with my sister). Despite the frequent references to her international travels as a touring artist, the album instead left me nostalgic for a 7-Eleven, the quiet refuge of an all-night drugstore.
Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo album, was a special record when it came out five years ago, and after half a decade its impact remains inarguable. Punisher is often lauded for meeting the moment, an album that’s all apocalyptic dread and gallows’ humor, some of it unintentional at the time: But I can count on you to tell me the truth/When you’ve been drinking and you’re wearing a mask is a line written before the pandemic, but will forever feel tongue-in-cheek having landed in a moment where many of us were spending our days drinking and wearing masks. Funnier and darker still is the fact that the pandemic wasn’t just convenient timing for this record–it was perhaps the only time that an album like this could be released to this level of mainstream success.
As far as I see it, if the lockdowns and upheaval of 2020 are what left you feeling like the world was about to end, you were late to the party. Apocalypse was already in the air, and Bridgers’ was just smart enough to capture it at the perfect time. Most of Bridgers’ crushing lyrics are straightforward observations: You are sick/And you’re married/And you might be dying; They killed a fan down by the stadium; I used to light you up/Now I can’t even get you to play the drums. Simply by choosing to acknowledge reality instead of penning a tune to escape it, Bridgers’ lyricism comes off as starkly honest and eerily prophetic. For just a brief second in pop culture, escapist bangers felt out of touch and catharsis was what felt fresh–for a moment there we wanted to talk about it.
A lot of pandemic-era album rollouts were underwhelming; all of the Zoom photo shoots and quarantine-friendly music videos felt like placeholders for what were supposed to be more exciting cultural moments. This wasn’t the case for Punisher–which was a masterclass in low-budget marketing–or at least giving the impression of it. Make no mistake, the growing success of Bridgers’ debut album Stranger in the Alps had put her miles ahead of other indie artists in terms of the resources she had access to. She graced the cover of magazines like Playboy and DIY with the help of drone-operated cameras and webcams, used a green screen for her NPR Tiny Desk Concert and telecommuted into live performances on late night television shows. No matter how mainstream the opportunity, the lo-fi constraints of the pandemic left her indie reputation intact.
Perhaps the most effective moments in Punisher’s album cycle were her livestreams on Instagram, which she cleverly marketed as a “tour” around her Los Angeles apartment. She performed a mix of old songs and yet-to-be released tracks from the album, introduced fans to her friends and collaborators, and raised money for bail funds–all while donning the same pair or pajamas day after day. By the time Punisher was released, six songs making up over half of the album were out in the world either as official releases or grainy livestream videos uploaded to YouTube. Watching it unfold in real life, it didn’t feel like overkill. It felt personal, intimate, authentic. I had no choice but to be a fan, and she had no choice but to be a star.
Of course, this parasociality is a double-edged sword, and that’s not lost on Bridgers. We were invited into her home and her social circle and ended up feeling like we knew her–not dissimilar to the connection she sings about on Punisher’s title track. Dedicated to Elliot Smith, the track is her confession that her admiration for Smith has shaped her life right down to the neighborhood she lived in at the making of the record. It’s also an admission that this love, as real as it feels, makes her a punisher, the kind of stifling fan that can make someone regret watching their dreams come true. Take for example, her relationship with actor Paul Mescal. A few weeks before the release of Punisher, in those same pajamas, Bridgers conducted a livestream interview with the then budding actor. To say her growing fanbase became invested in their relationship is an understatement. When the pair split in 2022, Bridgers described the Internet outrage that followed as bullying from her own fans. In many ways, it was sort of a bittersweet ending to the era and one that was ironically fitting: an album that built Bridgers’ reputation as a lyrical prophet ultimately predicted its own punishers.