I Want to Believe: A Retrospective on Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher
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Dead Oceans
I live in the “downtown” area of my sleepy slice of suburbia- it’s not as busy as a metropolitan Red Light District, but it’s way more active compared to the rest of the city. The weekend nights are usually colored with crowds of people hitting the array of bars and hookah lounges down the avenue, with the rhythmic pulse of reggaeton coating the neighborhood air until the sleepy hours of the early morning. After the clubs and bars have closed and ushered the last of the guests out to the street, I can hear snippets of drunk conversations, of friends laughing about whatever happened hours ago, yelling to pose for a quick Insta story, stumbling back to their cars through the otherwise quiet neighborhood that surrounds the once-busy strip.
Of course, this setting changed dramatically at the onset of the pandemic. The first quarter of 2020 was a bloated corpse of fear, uncertainty, and isolation, wrought with waves of misinformation and hate being spoon-fed to us through opaque algorithms that keep the social-media machine turning. The bar-going crowds had disappeared into the ether, the reggaeton drums replaced with the silence of a city stuck at home. The only conversations I heard came through my gaming headset, as my entire social life was absorbed into cyberspace via Discord and webcams- a ghost of a social life that had so suddenly been eviscerated.
This isolated world, under these bleak conditions, is where Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher found me. The first time I heard these songs was when I tuned into a Pitchfork YouTube livestream that Phoebe performed from her home in early 2020. I had never heard any of her work prior, but having been laid off from both of my jobs and being unable to leave my house, I decided to stick around for her performance. I was instantly captivated by her gentle fingerpicking, her silvery vocals, her devastating lyrics- it felt like she was addressing me specifically, an intimate performance between us two, despite the “NOW WATCHING” number creeping into the thousands. As soon as the performance ended, I opened up a new Chrome tab and looked for her music. Unfortunately, it would be a few months yet before Punisher would be released in its entirety.
The studio versions of the songs on Punisher are, understandably, a far cry from the solitary duet between Phoebe and her acoustic guitar that I watched near the start of the year. Phoebe’s beautiful, gentle fingerpicking is present throughout the record, but it frequently brushes up against more experimental and digital production. Take the lovely “Garden Song”- a wandering melody, played at the volume of a whisper on a guitar that almost sounds like it’s deteriorating at the frets, is blended with a pulsating electronic noise that seems to reluctantly hold the rhythm in lieu of a traditional drum beat. On “Punisher,” Phoebe’s voice is multi-tracked with harmonies of her own voice that are so digitally artifacted that it makes her dreams of meeting Elliot Smith all the more devastating. Elsewhere, Phoebe expertly adds and subtracts pieces from her arrangements and brings them back in for an emotional eruption. “Moon Song” is marked by one of these masterful depravations, as Phoebe is joined by explosive percussion and strings as she wrestles with her lack of faith in the supernatural- religious or otherwise.
If the music alone isn’t enough for you to fully fall under Punisher’s spell, then the lyrics might just be the final ingredient needed. Phoebe is one hell of a writer, equal parts humorous, candid, and insightful. The lyrics found within Punisher are dreamlike, coating the ordinary in a thin coat of the surreal. “Wake up and start a big fire / In our one-room apartment,” she writes in “Savior Complex,” capturing the volatility of a relationship plagued by petty arguments in an impressionistic metaphor. “So we spent what was left of our serotonin / To chew on our cheeks and stare at the moon,” goes another line in the boygenius collab “Graceland Too,” turning our brain’s happy chemical into a finite currency that can be exchanged for fleeting moments of contentment (or perhaps it’s a slight nod to using MDMA?). Phoebe’s characteristic conversational delivery drives home how well-written these songs are, yet they feel like a cafe catch-up with a friend telling you about an exceptionally futile week.
In fact, it’s difficult to escape the futility that forms the emotional undercurrent flowing underneath Punisher. But Phoebe is too great a writer to boil the futility of life into a one-dimensional pity party. As much of social media will tell you, there is much sadness to be found in this record. And yet, the vivid details Phoebe paints in her songs make you think that these small, painful moments are what make it all worth it in the end. Or, at least, that the constant pursuit of connection, whether romantic, familial, or platonic, is something that unites every single one of us. The world is devastating, cold, and cruel- but there are others here, and while they can sometimes be responsible for the strife we scrape against, they can also help us find our place in the world even when it feels like they are breaking it apart.
Punisher ends with the apocalyptic “I Know the End,” a song dressed with colorful imagery of the world ending. The song ends with a cacophonous choir of cathartic screaming from Phoebe and others as the music crescendos in a wall of noise, making a significant departure from the quiet verses earlier. At the end of the song, we hear Phoebe exhaling at an exhausted rasp, almost as if she has given every fiber of her being to us throughout the record. Or, maybe, she is imitating the roar of a crowd after an emotional performance, an experience none of us would have until years after the release of Punisher. Perhaps even more brilliantly: a melody reminiscent, if not identical, to the one found on opener “DVD Menu” is heard before the exhausted silence is earned. A narrative circle has been created, a mirror that bluntly reflects our world right back at us. We find ourselves right back where we started. We’re ready to make the same mistakes- and live- all over again.
Nickolas is an artist based in Southern California. Described by a beloved elementary teacher as an “absolute pleasure to have in class,” his work wrestles with the conflict between privacy and self-expression in the digital age. You can find him shitposting on Twitter @DjQuicknut and on Instagram @sopranos_on_dvd_
