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In a small glimmer of hope for 2020, Phoebe Bridgers has revealed that on June 19 she will release her sophomore solo album, Punisher, via Dead Oceans. The new album follows her 2017 debut, Stranger In The Alps, as well as some notable collaborations, including 2018’s boygenius EP with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and 2019’s Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst.
To celebrate the news, today (April 9) we’re given a new Bridgers single called “Kyoto,” and it’s the follow-up to February’s “Garden Song”. Watch the video below; it was completed by Bridgers using green screen in Los Angeles after plans to shoot the clip in Japan last month were nixed due to the coronavirus.
“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.”
Understandable.