Three years ago, Bridgers released her debut album, Stranger in the Alps, to admiring reviews. Photograph: Andrew Benge/Redfernsīut maybe it’s about time she had a rest. Performing at the Green Man festival in Brecon in 2018. “We’re supposed to be between Colorado and Omaha. “Before all this started,” she says, “my publicist told me I didn’t have one day off for three months.” When we speak, Bridgers should be somewhere in the American heartlands on tour with the 1975, on whose new album she features. This was meant to be a particularly busy time for Bridgers, whose album, her second, comes out on Friday. “I’ve been to the store, like, three times since this all started. “I’m extremely locked down,” she says, pacing on a treadmill as she talks. Since the pandemic hit, the 25-year-old, who lives alone in the arty Silver Lake area, has barely set foot outside her apartment. “There’s a lot about wishing I was home, which is dark,” she admits over a Zoom call from Los Angeles. The irony of all this anti-wanderlust isn’t lost on Bridgers now. “Then I flew over the ocean/ And I changed my mind.” “I wanted to see the world,” she sings rousingly on Kyoto. In Bridgers’s lyrical universe, dreams that appear beguiling from a distance are liable to fall flat in the space of a chorus. This is the predicament in which Phoebe Bridgers finds herself on her new album, Punisher, a collection of beautifully wrought songs that cast a razor-sharp eye on the absurdities of modern life. You would rather skip the visit to the temple or the ride on the bullet train with your bandmates and sneak home. Worse, you end up longing for the everyday comforts you’ve left behind.
But when you get there – to Japan, say – you find yourself strangely unmoved by your surroundings. Now you’re touring the world, jetting off to faraway places that you could only dream about while growing up in west-coast suburbia. Artists you greatly admire want to collaborate with you, declaring themselves “floored” by your music, and excitable comparisons are made to the work of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Y ou are a talented young musician whose career has taken off in the past couple of years.