Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t write love songs as much as songs about the impact love can have on our lives- personalities and priorities. Punisher her fourth release and second solo album is concerned with that subject. To say she writes about heartbreak is to undersell her blue wisdom to say she writes about pain erases all the strange joy her music emanates. The arrival of Punisher cements Phoebe Bridgers as one of the most clever tender and prolific songwriters of our era.Bridgers is the rare artist with enough humor to deconstruct her own meteoric rise. Repeatedly praised by publications like The New Yorker The New York Times GQ Pitchfork The Fader The Los Angeles Times and countless others Bridgers herself is more interested in discussing topics on Twitter deadpanning meditations on the humiliating process of being a person she presents a sweetly funny flipside to the strikingly sad songs she writes. Fittingly Punisher is fascinated with and driven by that kind of impossible tension. Whether it’s writing tweets or songs Bridgers’s singular talent lies in bringing fierce curiosity to slimy and painful things interrogating them until they yield up answers that are beautiful and absurd or faithfully reporting the reality that sometimes they are neither.Bridgers pulls together a formidable crew of guests including the Julien Baker Lucy Dacus Christian Lee Hutson and Conor Oberst as well as Nathaniel Walcott (of Bright Eyes) Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) Jenny Lee Lindberg (of Warpaint) Blake Mills and Jim Keltner as well as her longtime bandmates Marshall Vore (drums) Harrison Whitford (guitar) Emily Retsas (bass) and Nick White (keys). The album was mixed by Mike Mogis who also mixed Stranger In The Alps.On the album’s epic freewheeling closer “I Know The End” Bridgers orchestrates wails and horns drums and electric guitar into a sumptuous doomsday swirl culminating in her own final whispered roar. This is Punisher in a nutshell: devastating elegance punctuated by a moment of deeply campy self-awareness.