Phoebe Bridgers Announces New Album Punisher, Shares New Single “Kyoto”

Phoebe Bridgers’ highly anticipated sophomore album Punisher is set to be released on June 19 via Dead Oceans. Today (April 9), she releases its second single “Kyoto,” complete with a green screen music video featuring Bridgers soaring over the Japanese city’s skyline. “Kyoto” follows the previous single released from Punisher, the somber “Garden Song.”

Originally set to be filmed in Japan last month, the global pandemic halted those production plans. But Bridgers opted to cheekily use a green screen in order to create a magical realism-esque video, donning a skeleton-print onesie, gliding on electric train tracks and flying over the ocean.

“This song is about impostor syndrome,” Bridgers says. “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. 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.”

Punisher is the second album from Phoebe Bridgers, but she’s been more than busy since the release of her 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps. She recorded an EP as boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker back in 2018, and released a 2019 album with Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst as Better Oblivion Community Center.

Watch the music video for “Kyoto” below, and while you’re there, check out Phoebe Bridgers performing “Smoke Signals” at Paste Studio NYC back in 2017. Scroll down for the Punisher album art and tracklist.

Punisher Album Artwork:

Punisher Tracklist:

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