‘The doctor put her hands over my liver,” sings Phoebe Bridgers on Garden Song. “She told me my resentment’s getting smaller.” Arresting lyrics such as these have catapulted this 25-year-old LA singer-songwriter to the forefront of a wave of millennial songsmiths, informed in part by Laurel Canyon, in part by indie rock and – especially for Bridgers – the whispered urgency of the late Elliott Smith.
Bridgers’s second album under her own name, Punisher moves forward confidently from her 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps – an accomplished set that, in part, digested her vexed relationship with the disgraced Americana artist Ryan Adams. Across Punisher’s 11 tracks, matters of the heart recur – the none-more-90s cut I See You discusses Bridgers’s feelings for her drummer ex – but her deceptively lovely treatments range widely, taking in the disappointments of touring on Kyoto and I Know the End, or saltines and serotonin on Graceland Too. The excellent Halloween channels Smith most audibly, but the song’s gently plucked meditations and quavery anomie are all Bridgers’s own.
