Phoebe Bridgers, elusiveness, and the art of doing something new
Phoebe Bridgers is back, and she’s back with a bang. Well, perhaps more like a modest round of applause.
Bridgers became the modern indie darling at the turn of the decade between the 2010s and 2020s. Her debut, Stranger in the Alps, was released in 2017 and followed up in relatively quick succession by Punisher in 2020, but then, aside from Boygenius, everything seemingly went quiet.
As undeniably the most commercially successful member of that supergroup, it certainly raised some questions. Bridgers obviously inhabited a persona which veered more towards the emo and gothic side of the indie canon, and with this, a sense of quietness and untraceability often comes part and parcel.
But even still, six years is a long time to leave your solo career dangling, with no one seemingly knowing when the next chapter would begin. Then, from the start of this year, a few small whispers turned into some chatter with a couple of sparse shows, and then an announcement was made about The Lost Tour. However, no screaming has arrived yet.
It’s clear that whatever Bridgers’ intentions are for this era, they are both unknowable and entirely unconventional. We know there is new music somewhere in the ether – she performed eight new tracks at her last-minute show in New York’s Madison Square Garden at the start of June – but with not a hint of this being made public as of yet, it’s impossible to predict when the wider world will hear it.
Indeed, the entire evident choice to operate her new ventures mostly offline, with only the official tour announcement making it to social media so far, and the rest just simply popping up out of nowhere or gaining traction through word of mouth, seems at odds with everything that the modern mode of marketing has supposedly taught us.
However, it also makes you stop and think. Bridgers released her last album, Punisher, in what transpired only to be the relative beginnings of an unprecedented global pandemic, where the world was forced to move itself solely online if it had any hope of maintaining connection. That kept us all sane in some ways, but there’s no denying it was also a completely alien form of living.
From an artist’s point of view, having to put your entire life and soul into social media and yearn for human connection to return, while never knowing at the time whether it would or not, must have been as terrifying as it was heartbreaking. You could understand why musicians like Bridgers, who were forced to release music in that context, would be averse to ever going near it again.
This may contextualise her very minimalist start to this era somewhat, but it still doesn’t escape the fact that even in standard terms, the approach is fairly unconventional. Sure, she’s sold out every date of the tour since it went on sale, which proves that she didn’t need any huge fanfare to get bums on seats, but everything about it feels just a little unnatural.
And, using the clues we have so far, it doesn’t seem like fans will have much to go on before Bridgers starts gracing stages this September. The no-phones rule at concerts is something that has become an increasing talking point, but the blanket ban is still a little ruthless. Yes, you could argue it creates an intimate connection, but it also suggests that there might be a greater exclusive air around these gigs than most.
I’m entirely theorising at this point, but with the way that this rollout is going so far, I would be inclined to think that Bridgers’ new album may not be arriving anytime particularly soon. The fact that there will be no recording means that fans will be going into these shows with a sense of intrigue at the forefront of their minds, and it would be foolish to ruin that by letting them hear the music.
Of course, in itself, that would be creating an entirely new method of musical rollout that has rarely been seen before. Letting the experience of an album be dictated by its live presence before the studio, and not allowing anyone to ruin that illusion through social media, is an inverted, unusual, and dizzying way of doing things.
But then again, after the insanity of the pandemic years, everything Bridgers stands for really should be inverted, unusual, and dizzy.
