Hope you didn’t have plans, because your daily cry is going to happen now. Phoeber Bridgers just dropped her second album, Punisher, at 9 a.m. ET, about 15 hours ahead of schedule. And as any Bridgers fan already knows, expect it to wreck you. Bridgers pushed up Punisher with a simple tweet and Instagram post alluding recent protests against police brutality and systemic racism, and maybe the COVID-19 pandemic, too. “I’m not pushing the record until things go back to ‘normal’ because I don’t think they should,” she wrote. “Here it is a little early. Abolish the police. Hope you like it.” Punisher, Bridgers’s second album, includes past singles “Garden Song,” “Kyoto,” and “I See You.” It also features contributions from her boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus and her Better Oblivion Community Center collaborator Conor Oberst, along with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, Warpaint’s Jenny Lee Lindberg, and Fiona Apple’s bassist Sebastian Steinberg. Bridgers recently featured on two of the year’s other major rock albums, Hayley Williams’s Petals for Armor and The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form. She was set to open for The 1975 on tour this summer, but for now, we’ll have to settle for blasting Punisher in our bedrooms.
