5 years of Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers

Laughing in the face of death and fear.

I imagined post grad being fun—and for a little while it was. After years dealing with undiagnosed anxiety and depression, I finally spoke to a therapist and got the medicine I needed to function normally. Finally free from the grips of institutional groupthink—no more Catholic school, no more Ohio State football!!!—I was finally able to dedicate my free time to things I actually cared about like books and music. My roommate and I would go out whenever we could and drink until we swore we’d never let alcohol touch our lips again, only to do it all over at the next opportunity.

After months of job searching I was hired to do odds and ends for a marketing agency. At first the job was exciting, fun, even: I kept busy and learned a lot, I really liked a lot of my coworkers (many of them are still dear friends today). Against my better judgement, I entered into a workplace dalliance with a person ten years older than me. But I was 22 and reckless and I didn’t care about what I’d want or need 5 days from then let alone 5 years. It would all just have to do for the time being.

A few months later, the world shut down. In March 2020, the office went remote and everything keeping me functional—routine, commutes, noisy coworkers—fell away. By this point I was also already months deep and one humiliating disaster into a situationship with the aforementioned man. When Phoebe Bridgers’ sophomore album Punisher released just a few months later in June, I was the perfect audience.

Punisher was really a perfect pandemic album. It’s strange but comforting, melancholic but not maudlin, and oddly specific but universal. A record that wraps itself around your worst thoughts and says, “Yeah, that’s fair.” I had heard of Phoebe, played “Motion Sickness” a time or two, but I was hesitant to listen because I felt like I was already behind. When I saw her dancing around in that little skeleton suit in a clip from the “Kyoto” video though, my curiosity took over, and Punisher quickly altered how I listened, engaged with, and interpreted music personally.

On the intake form for my new therapist, one of the questions was something along the lines of "was I afraid of death”—I remember ticking “no” without a second thought. When she asked me to clarify in our first appointment, I told her the truth, outrageous as it was: surrounded by death in the height of a global pandemic, a sad white girl indie singer had helped me confront it head on. Thanks to Phoebe, I found that life on earth was far worse than being dead could ever be. The many monsters that roam the earth can’t get you if you’re already dead.

On the cover she looks up into the stars in the desert sky, perhaps contemplating what could possibly exist up there that allows all that goes on down here. Phoebe said they initially took the cover photos in some over the top gown but ended up redoing it in a $10 skeleton costume—what she deemed a “silly representation of death” that would become synonymous with her. Death was not something to fear, but a relief, a joke even. Usually a sad one, but with a finality that cannot be challenged no matter the circumstances. Very unlike life and all the relationships that make it up–those are incredibly fraught. She sings about this too, and it was equally if not more unsettling, holding up a mirror to all the things I’d rather ignore.

A lot of Punisher is heart wrenching, but Phoebe somehow still makes you feel goofy after all of it. Like when you really let it all out and have that automatic feeling of “...was I being a little dramatic?” You can’t get to that point without the catharsis—and that’s what Punisher is for. Phoebe’s ability to describe those lower than low moments with acute intensity makes it feel like she is right there in it with you.

At 22, in the middle of a raging pandemic, everything felt incredibly dramatic. And despite said pandemic, my bosses mandated some of us come in to do work for a (now defunct) homegoods store. I’d go in early, the sun trailing close behind on the highway as Punisher pulsed through my car speakers, insisting “When I grow up I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life”. Other times I’d be driving home, blaring “I Know The End” at full volume, letting out a person sized scream, my boss’s voice still ringing in my ears.

Believe or not, a workplace romance DIDN’T help—his presence hanging like a dark cloud one moment, burning like sunshine the next. One day he’d text me nonstop, walking past my desk just to get a peek, asking to meet in the equipment closet. Then I wouldn’t hear from him for a few days, sometimes weeks. I was so distraught over what he thought of me and how I could win him over, I didn’t ever stop to wonder if I even actually liked this person. When I was sad and confused, “Moon Song” held me, coddled me in a way that made it tolerable.

It’s not a happy album by any means. This was sad white girl music (complimentary) of the highest caliber and I felt seen. I remember planning a trip to Colorado around Phoebe’s show at Red Rocks. One of my friends who went to the show with me remarked that the music made it feel like being in a haunted house, which I know she meant hyperbolically but I couldn’t help but laugh because it was so on the nose.

The whole album feels like floating through a daydream, or purgatory, or sitting in a dentist office having a fever dream pre procedure. Phoebe worked with Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska (the former worked on Katie Gavin’s 2024 solo project What A Relief…hate when I owe a man my life). They employed a plugin called Lossy that crushes and distorts sound in such a way it’s almost like you’re listening through a bad internet connection. Using the tool over all the instrumentals, dropping the treble to further muffle the sound, there’s an eerie dullness that allows Phoebe’s vocals to really stand out—and the lyrics are really the star of the show anyway.

On tour, Phoebe started the show with sad girl opus “Motion Sickness” before playing the entirety of Punisher start to finish. I went to that tour three or four times, all my big girl job wages going straight to booze and concert tickets. But it was everything to me to hear these songs live. I’ll never forget as the intro for “Moon Song” faded in: “Like water in your hands” echoing into that opening guitar riff that still makes my stomach drop. I remember being in the middle of the Colorado mountains, the moon hanging like a lantern as we all wished hard on a Chinese satellite. Hearing someone sing about their daddy issues and death and rejection with a sort of detached and humored maturity–I needed that.

Cleveland stop on the Phoebe Bridgers 2021/2022 reunion tour

In an interview from late 2020, Phoebe said she might be embarrassed by Punisher in five years. And I understand that impulse. Vulnerability is terrifying, especially when it’s preserved in amber and sold as merch. I spent the better part of my early twenties being deeply, publicly humiliated by a man who still lives in my memory like a cursed relic. An event that really could have messed with my ability to share my feelings even with the right person, Phoebe somehow turned around. That she put all her sadness and all her mistakes into a record that makes people feel seen—that’s nothing to be embarrassed about at all.

What Punisher gave me–what I didn’t even know I needed–was emotional permission: to drown in my feelings, to find humor in death when the fear should have consumed me, to cry over someone who never really saw me, and to know that I wasn’t alone in any of it.

Now that I’ve learned all this, I won’t be afraid when the end comes—I’ll shrug my shoulders and say “yeah I guess.”