Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher is a Horror Movie
A one-year retrospective.
Phoebe Bridgers (photo via billboard.com)
June 18th was the anniversary of the release of Phoebe Bridgers’ sophomore album, Punisher. Listening to Punisher is chilling because when you put the album on, you’re really just watching one of the greatest horror films of all time. As you press play on your speakers or your headphones, you’ll find yourself sitting on that couch in that place you lived in during the 2000s. You’ll tear open the clear wrapping around your brand-new DVD and hear that satisfying click as you open the box. You’ll carefully, very carefully, take out the sparkling DVD, pop it into your player, and fiddle with the remote until you somehow get the TV on the right setting. While you wait for someone to bring the popcorn, you know your operation has been a success when you hear that musical loop that plays on the main menu screen of the DVD.
It’s a preview of the soundtrack or score to come. A stripped, more somber version of what might turn into a startling, maximalist movie instrumental later on. That’s exactly what happens in Punisher, but you’ll get to that. The first thing you notice on the opening track, “DVD Menu,” is how spooky it is. Yes, spooky is the only way to describe Bridgers’ music. Here, what makes it spooky is the distant sound of Bridgers’s soft, high-pitched voice being played backwards. This is actually a sample of “You Missed My Heart,” the final full song on Bridgers’s first album, Stranger in the Alps. Stranger was littered with ghostly imagery, so it’s no surprise that the Stranger sample, especially played backwards, sounds just like that: a ghost. But, just you wait – ghosts are far from the only supernatural creatures that make an appearance on Punisher.
So, you hear the spooky singing, if you listen very closely, and you also hear the gorgeous strings that start to swell over the deep, rumbling basses and guitars. The opener on Punisher is short, and like the (also short) closing track on Stranger, the only track where Bridgers doesn’t sing. The strings play a really haunting melody. What a beautiful melody, you think to yourself. You can’t help but remember this melody. The opener really does sound like a loop, in the same way that the music of a DVD menu tends to loop. It also tells you you’re in for something quite dark, the way a good horror movie’s menu made you feel. As you press play on the film, track one softly fades as the screen changes and the movie starts. You’ve only heard one song so far and Bridgers has already managed to subtly call back to the end of her last album, as if Punisher is its sequel. She’s also already managed to very quietly foreshadow the shit out of the rest of the album. Essentially, the song “DVD Menu” is just a really great DVD menu.
The movie starts with the second track “Garden Song,” a really pretty title for a really pretty singer-songwriter track about murder. It’s about murder. The lyrics of the first verse sound like the confession of a stalker who fantasizes about living with her muse, murdering their neighbor, and covering up the body with a rose garden. Bridgers has a way of making the blunt horror of it all feel endearing, and at times sexy. She weaves together the terrible and the wonderful until they become hard to distinguish. Ghosts make a return with the beautiful and terrifying lyric “Everything's growing in our garden/You don't have to know that it's haunted.” Despite how aggressively creepy this song is, you root for Bridgers, the stalker-murderer-ghost lady, because the twelve-string guitars that pluck away, her poetry, and her raw, angelic voice are all so damn beautiful.
After we’re introduced to our antihero Phoebe Bridgers, we transition into what is one of the only two upbeat songs on this album, so savor it before the real emotional torture starts. “Kyoto,” the third track, parallels the way Stranger’s second song, “Motion Sickness,” is also the only upbeat track on the whole project. Both “Kyoto” and “Motion Sickness” serve as the closest thing Bridgers can make to a diss track.
“Kyoto” is an indie rock song about how angry she is at her dad. When Bridgers came to perform virtually at UChicago a few months ago, she said most people think the song’s about an absent father, but it’s really about an overbearing one. The thing about “Kyoto” is that there are no ghosts, murders, or spooky sounds at all. It’s a great song to play in the car while you drive down the street in the summer in a way “Garden Song” will never be. “Kyoto” is scarier, though. It’s the first example of Bridgers blurring the lines between her supernatural world and her real life. In “Kyoto,” she’s reminding us that she’s a real girl with real issues and that sometimes the true horror comes from the crude realities of life. This song is gut-wrenching for anyone with a complicated relationship with someone they really love, as she passionately sings “I don't forgive you, but please don't hold me to it.” She’s taking us through the turbulence of wanting to forgive and not knowing where to start.
It’s here that you realize this horror film is much more involved than anticipated. We have gruesome images interspersed with normal ones, like any good, suspenseful blockbuster. We then transition into what is one of my favorite songs on the album: the title track – one of the most emotional songs on the album. Bridgers is singing to the late Elliott Smith, her hero. She actually lives in the same neighborhood as Smith and likes to talk about how she would most definitely have found him if he were still alive. The song is devastating, partly for that reason: she resides in the same neighborhood as her hero and will never get to meet him. The irony is cruel. Furthermore, Smith notoriously died as a result of two stab wounds to the chest. To this day, it’s an unsolved case with more questions than answers. Nobody really knows if if it was suicide or murder, but either way, it’s an example of when real life becomes real horror and it’s the very song that gave the album it’s name.
The next song is called “Halloween.” Halloween for Pete's sake. Here are the opening lines: “I hate living by the hospital/The sirens go all night/I used to joke that if they woke you up/somebody better be dying.” Enough said. No, really, this is a true story from her life – she also references it in a boygenius song. I actually also lived by a hospital once; my window faced the emergency room entrance and it was very gruesome, to say the least. It’s really funny to me how she talks about these things so casually, but sings about heartbreak like nothing’s worse. She’s mastered irony, and moreover, she’s managed to casually highlight how our own perspectives on what matters and what doesn’t are also really fucked most of the time. I love “Halloween” because of the beautiful plucking intro and the way the plucks persist throughout the song. I also love the refrain “Baby, it's Halloween/We can be anything.” I love the way this turns into “Whatever you want/I'll be whatever you want.” It really captures that desperate feeling of just wanting to be told who to be to make someone want you. And she does it using a spooky metaphor, yet again.
When you get to track 8, “Savior Complex,” a song about a sinking relationship, you get the gorgeous line, “Baby you’re a vampire/You want blood and I promised/I’m a bad liar/With a savior complex.” So, at this point, we’ve got ghosts, murder, halloween, hospitals, and now vampires. After “Savior Complex,” we get the aptly named “ICU,” a play on words with the phrase “I see you.” The song essentially talks about the feeling of falling in love unexpectedly, with the chorus saying “I feel something when I see you.” Titling the song “ICU” really drives home the message that Bridgers is viewing falling in love as a bad thing. It’s almost turning love itself into a tragedy. After all, she’s just spent several songs telling us about how much love has hurt her. Even the final line of this song is “let the dystopian morning light pour in,” so we can add dystopia to the list of horror film images that Bridgers has painted for us so far. What an odd sentence for an upbeat love song, eh?
So we’re nearing the end here (hehe). You get to track 10, “Graceland Too,” when suddenly you hear a familiar voice. Is that…Lucy Dacus?!? Yes. It is. And…Julien Baker!! In my headphones, Dacus is in the right channel and Baker’s in the left. If you don’t know who I’m talking about, Dacus and Baker are two thirds of the supergroup boygenius, whose third member is Phoebe Bridgers. In many ways, “Graceland Too'' is like an extra boygenius song. If you’re familiar with their voices, you’ll love picking them out of the mix on this track. I digress.
And then “I Know the End.” This song is of humble beginnings. Don’t let that fool you. Frankly, the whole album is tied together by a consistent ethereal soundscape that feels something like being underwater or being asleep or perhaps dreaming that you’re underwater. The beginning sounds a lot like another soul-crushing singer-songwriter track where Bridgers will croon over a guitar. However, this song is unique in the way it builds so slowly you don’t even realize the pot is boiling until you’re strapped in for the most eventful climax this horror film could have conceivably had.
Before you know it, the electric guitars pick up, followed by a steady drum. It’s very clear this is the start of a crescendo, but you can’t even imagine how glorious it will be yet.
When this beat switch happens and as the anticipation starts to build, Bridgers starts listing things for us, and it’s quite unnerving: “A slaughterhouse, an outlet mall/ Slot machines, fear of God/Windows down, heater on.” Somehow, slaughterhouses do feel like they belong on the same list as slot machines and malls. Again, Bridgers reminds us that she’s not talking about some fictional, dystopian end of the world, she’s talking about the world we live in. It’s quite fitting, considering the album dropped in the middle of the pandemic, when the world felt like a slaughterhouse; slot machines and outlet malls were as vacant as a “haunted house with a picket fence,” another item on her crescendo list. It’s really striking how relatable the lyrics of this song are in the context of life during the pandemic, with lines like “float around and ghost my friends/No, I'm not afraid to disappear,” in a time when all of us had no choice but to disappear, further from our friends than ever. This song is a particularly chilling finale, given that the song was finished before the pandemic but still incredibly apocalyptic.
Bridgers also throws in another supernatural creature on this song with the lyrics “Big bolt of lightning hanging low/Over the coast, everyone's convinced/It's a government drone or an alien spaceship.” There’s really nothing this horror movie hasn’t included. We’re at ghosts, murder, halloween, hospitals, vampires, dystopia, and now aliens and government conspiracy? It’s fitting considering all of the imagery surrounding Bridgers’s first album was of ghosts. In the Punisher era, Bridgers was never seen performing without her skeleton onesie. The supernatural death thing is everywhere and it works. However, with Punisher, Bridgers is making it very clear that her franchise has upgraded from a ghost story to a high-budget, gory psychological thriller. You’re placed at the heart of her life and yours in the context of a horror film. There are several albums that came out in 2020 that will go down as expressions of what it was like to live through the COVID-19 pandemic. To me, Punisher is an instant classic because of how well it tells that horror story. You can see the spooky creatures and bloody scenery as one big allegory for the dreadful isolation, loss, and paranoia of this past year. Even the spacey vocal layering and atmosphere of the album reminds me of the time-warped haze that was daily life in lockdown.
So at this point, you really don’t think this song could get any more epic, and then you notice something. What a great melody you think to yourself. Where could I have possibly heard that before? That’s right! This is the same melody we heard way back in “DVD Menu,” coming back one final time in the last track. She’s used “DVD Menu” to seamlessly tie Punisher to her first album, Stranger in the Alps, as well as to tie Punisher itself together.
At the end of the final song, Bridgers screams. She just starts screaming. Bridgers, the soft, airy voiced, angelic Phoebe Bridgers unleashes a guttural scream into the microphone. I can’t put into words how powerful and shocking this moment is, so I won’t try. This follows the repetition of the words “the end is near” over distorted guitars, wild drumming, a chorus, and dramatic, cinematic strings. If this doesn’t capture the terror of the world changing so dramatically so suddenly the way it did, I don’t know what would. The very end of the song sees Bridgers doing some sort of quiet whisper scream, almost like she’s lost her voice. As we begin to step into the light at the end of this long, depressing tunnel a whole year after this album’s release, this moment of exhausted strength feels incredibly honest. This conclusion makes Punisher feel like a celebration of all that we survived this past year and a validation of the bleakness of it all.
A whole year later, Punisher holds up even more strongly and in a much brighter light. So grab some popcorn, put it on, and enjoy the chills. Happy Birthday, Punisher.
Edited by Sha Frasier, Managing Editor
Cover Art by Miriam Sills