Phoebe Bridgers Announces New Album Punisher, Shares New Song ‘Kyoto’: Listen
The singer-songwriter’s sophomore LP is out in June
Phoebe Bridgers has announced her sophomore solo album: Punisher is out June 19 via Dead Oceans. The follow-up to Stranger in the Alps includes “Garden Song,” as well as a new track called “Kyoto.” Check out Bridgers’ new “Kyoto” video below. Find physical editions of Punisher at Rough Trade. (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
According to a press release, Bridgers had hoped to film her “Kyoto” video in Japan last month, but was forced to alter her plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, she made the visual with a green screen in Los Angeles.
“This song is about impostor syndrome. About being in Japan for the first time, somewhere I’ve always wanted to go, and playing my music to people who want to hear it, feeling like I’m living someone else’s life,” Bridgers said of “Kyoto” in statement. “I dissociate when bad things happen to me, but also when good things happen. It can feel like I’m performing what I think I’m supposed to be like. I wrote this one as a ballad first, but at that point I was so sick of recording slow songs, it turned into this.”
Phoebe Bridgers wrote and recorded Punisher between summer 2018 and autumn 2019. She worked on the new album with co-producers Tony Berg and Ethan Gruska. Her band on the record includes drummer Marshall Vore, guitarist Harrison Whitford, bassist Emily Restas, and pianist Nick White. In addition, Punisher has contributions from familiar faces like Conor Oberst, Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, Christian Lee Hutson, Nick Zinner, Blake Mills, and Bright Eyes’ Nathaniel Walcott, who plays horns on “Kyoto” and “I Know the End.”
Since releasing Stranger in the Alps in September 2017, Bridgers has shared the boygenius EP with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, as well as Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst.
Punisher:
01 DVD Menu
02 Garden Song
03 Kyoto
04 Punisher
05 Halloween
06 Chinese Satellite
07 Moon Song
08 Savior Complex
09 ICU
10 Graceland Too
11 I Know the End
Watch Phoebe Bridgers with Conor Oberst on Pitchfork’s “Over/Under”: