Phoebe Bridgers’s “Punisher” is a stunner. The album feels simultaneously like a singular, personal expression and like it’s in dialogue with a lot of other musicians and albums. Like other brilliant lyricists, she has an incredible knack for picking the specific, concrete detail that evokes whole worlds of sensations and memories. She’s also filled the album with a strong sense of place—bits of L.A. and California all throughout the songs. (The line in “Garden Song” about Pasadena—”they’re gluing roses/on a flatbed/you should see it/I mean thousands” is so good, that almost afterthought placement of “I mean thousands” at the end of the line).
“Punisher” also seems like Bridgers picking up things she’s loved over the years and transforming those elements to fit her vision. She’s mentioned in interviews how much she loves Elliott Smith’s music, and how she doubles her vocals on some tracks as an homage to his use of the same technique. There’s “Savior Complex”’s little pockets of strings and pedal steel that bring to mind early Bright Eyes. One of the best examples of this is on “Kyoto,” one of my favorites on the record, which features a stone-cold Beulah trumpet line running throughout the whole song, a trumpet that sounds like it could have come straight from Bill Swan circa “When Your Heartstrings Break.” So unexpected, so good, it fits in the song perfectly. So besides being an amazing songwriter and lyricist, Bridgers is an expert at deploying little bits of musical texture and references from the last few decades of music.
Bridgers did a fascinating video interview for Spotify recently where she talked about the best advice she’s ever gotten, and she said that Haley Dahl, her bandmate in Sloppy Jane, said “your greatest ideas are your jokes,” the idea being that ideas that start off as silly hypotheticals end up becoming, over time, honest expressions or compelling ways of working. “DVD Menu,” the first track on the album, seems like the result of this kind of process—it’s so right on, the exact type of music that would be looping in the background while you get ready to hit play on a movie. It feels like a joke, and it is funny, but it also sets the tone so perfectly for the record.