2020 was… a year. Full of what felt like endless pain and being trapped in our homes. However, the start of the ’20s was not a complete waste of time. The music that was released during this 365-day timeline will be talked about and appreciated for the years to come.
If you’ve been paying any attention to awards season (or are a fan of Saturday Night Live), you’ve definitely heard of Phoebe Bridgers. Bridgers has been an active indie-rock musician since the 2010s, but her music has started to become more mainstream. Her 2020 album Punisher helped her receive four Grammy nominations, including Best New Artist.
Despite not winning any notable awards, Punisher has been given stellar reviews by critics and adored by teens and adults around the world. Bridgers has gained an almost cult following on TikTok, where her fans call themselves “Pharbz” (a play on Nicki Minaj’s fanbase nickname “Barbz”) and have made several videos ranking, dancing to, and relating to her songs.
Over the summer of 2020, as I was preparing to leave home and enter a new era of my life at college, I stumbled upon Punisher a few weeks after its release in June. I had listened to a few of Bridgers’ songs from her previous album Stranger In The Alps a few years before, but nothing had particularly stuck with me. However, I was getting tired of the quarantine playlists that I had been playing on loop since late March.
So I sat down and gave Punisher a full listen. It was worth every minute.
Let’s talk about Punisher, and why everyone should give this melancholy indie-rock album a shot at least once.
DISCLAIMER: I am in no way a professional music critic! This is just my take on one of my favorite albums from the hardest year of my life, and frankly everyone’s hardest year. This is really just a way to get you to listen to the album too! Take my opinions with a grain of salt.
The album opens with DVD Menu, a short instrumental that feels like the perfect introduction to the passive storm that is Punisher. It’s soft and downcast while foreshadowing later songs that use a similar chord progression (the latter half of album closer I Know The End).
While most of the songs follow this formula of being slow-tempo and relatively sad, Kyoto is one of the only songs that seem to break away from this- the keyword being “seem’, as the lyrics seem to fit right in with the rest of her discography. Kyoto is the type of song you can put in several different types of playlists without it seeming out of place. It is beautiful and sad, as Bridgers recalls memories of her father and how he has affected her through the years (“I’m gonna kill you if you don’t beat me to it”).
As Punisher continues without a hitch with the lyrical talent of songs like Moon Song and Graceland Too, the listener finds themselves at I Know The End. The closing track is Bridger’s love letter to the apocalypse. As she imagines herself driving through the end of the world, the song swells, cascades and explodes into screaming, drums and horns and strings competing to be heard; just utter chaos stuffed into the final two minutes.
This is my favorite moment of any song from 2020. The build-up of I Know The End is so raw and honest that I had to listen to it five times over upon my first listen-through. The end of the world is coming and Bridgers can’t do anything about it, so she just screams. It’s such a good summary of how the past 12 months have felt for all of us.
Sometimes, we just need a good scream.
Above all, however, Punisher is nothing if not an album filled with desire. Bridgers is constantly highlighting this, whether it be her own desires, seen in “I get everything I want” from Garden Song, or someone else’s, seen in “Whatever she wants” from Graceland Too. Someone, as in Phoebe or the characters in her songs, is looking for something, wanting something. We’ve all been wanting something as of late. Freedom, happiness, something more. Punisher is the cultivation of desire and an amalgamation of chaos.
Punisher is for the dreamers, and I highly recommend you give it a listen.