Punisher

Phoebe Bridgers started writing songs for Punisher before her debut album had even come out. By the time she finished recording it at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, over a year and a half in 2018 and 2019, she had formed two bands in the interim: boygenius with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst. Both of those collaborators appear on Punisher, as do Jim Keltner, Blake Mills, and more than two dozen other musicians listed in the liner notes. The album is formally a solo record that sounds like a community of people who love each other making something together.

Producer Tony Berg, who also worked on her debut, convinced her to speed up "Kyoto," which she had written as a slow ballad during her first trip to Japan. The faster version transformed it into one of the year's most exhilarating songs, trumpet-bright and running forward like something escaping. "Savior Complex" came from a melody Bridgers wrote in a dream and sang into her phone before she could forget it. The closing track "I Know the End" was recorded with a male chorus and builds through three distinct movements from whispered folk to a full horn section to thirty seconds of screaming, and it lands with a finality that makes the whole album feel like it was always building to exactly that moment.

Bridgers has said she does not always know what an album is about until years after making it. Punisher is about grief, about anxiety, about loving people so much it becomes a problem, about the specific dread of being alive in a world that keeps being worse than you hoped. It arrived in the middle of a pandemic, and somehow that timing felt less like coincidence than like something inevitable.