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This past Friday, Oct. 7, Phoebe Bridgers’s 2017 debut album “Stranger in the Alps” earned a spot on the Billboard Top 200 list for the first time, coming in as the 82nd most popular album of the week. Sept. 22 marked the fifth anniversary of the album’s release, so fans have no doubt been revisiting the record that started Bridgers on the path to indie stardom. The coming of autumn, a season many fans associate with the singer-songwriter’s sweetly melancholic music, is yet another reason to queue up the album.
Given Bridgers’s impressive resume, which includes four Grammy nominations and collaborations with Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney, it’s not surprising to see her name top the charts. But this widespread acclaim would have been unthinkable for the Los Angeles-based artist just five years ago. “Stranger in the Alps” was truly the launch pad for Bridgers’s career. The eleven-track album unleashed Bridgers’s addictively cathartic blend of sorrow, humor, and anger on the world. It also opened up avenues for collaboration that would cement her role as not only the musical voice of today’s indie music scene, but also the embodiment of its spirit.
There is quite possibly no sound as immediately recognizable to “pharbs" (Phoebe Bridgers fans) as the opening chords of “Motion Sickness,” the second song on “Stranger in the Alps.” It’s still Bridgers’s most popular song, and for good reason — it’s a devastatingly effective exploration of the shock of a toxic relationship. “I hate you for what you did / And I miss you like a little kid,” she sweetly sings over a driving rock beat and distorted guitar. There’s no separation between love and resentment — the conjunction “and” forces listeners to join these opposites into one person. Bridgers’s gentle vocals also clash with the harsh instrumentation in the background, suggesting that she can’t fully acknowledge the rage she harbors inside. The song quickly takes a turn as it hurtles towards a liberating climax, a feature that has come to define Bridgers’s music. “I have emotional motion sickness / Somebody roll the windows down / There are no words in the English language / I could scream to drown you out,” she sings.
The song becomes all the more important when viewed in the context of Bridgers’s relationship with former indie artist Ryan Adams. After hearing some of her demo recordings in 2014, the prolific musician and producer invited Bridgers to work closely with him. The two quickly entered into a romantic relationship. According to Bridgers, Adams, who is 20 years older than her, began to display emotionally manipulative and abusive behavior. When Bridgers ended the relationship, Adams hinted at jeopardizing her career.
In an interview with the New York Times, Bridgers described how he became “evasive” about progress on her projects and even canceled her shows. After releasing “Motion Sickness,” she revealed that the song was about her former collaborator, becoming one of the first to publicly speak out against Adams. In 2019, she expressed support for the dozens of other women who later came forward about Adams’s abusive behavior. The first part of Bridgers’s career was nearly defined by Adams — many critics and fans attributed her success to his support. With “Stranger in the Alps,” her first major project without Adams’s involvement, she asserted that she surpassed his influence by sharing powerfully healing art.
A defining characteristic of Bridgers’s music that takes center stage in “Stranger in the Alps” is her personal narrative style. Her lyrics focus on specific life experiences as well as intimate thoughts and observations. On “Funeral,” she sings about performing at a friend’s memorial service. Though not all listeners may have lived through a similar situation, Bridgers uses it to craft a relatable and honest reflection on suffocating grief. “Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time / And that’s just how I feel / Always have and I always will,” she sighs in the chorus. She doesn’t feel the need to offer feel-good resolutions but embraces the emotional enormity of sadness. “And it’s 4 a.m. again / And I’m doing nothing / Again,” she sings at the end of the track.
Though undeniably bleak, Bridgers’s music feels more reflective than despondent. Her songs bask in melancholy but also look at it critically. Subtle humor is one of her most effective tools. On album-opener “Smoke Signals,” she explores the slow breakdown of a relationship. As she bitterly revisits memories, she sings, “I want to live at the Holiday Inn / Where somebody else makes the bed.” This line sounds out of place — ten-year-olds dream of living at chain hotels, not indie rockers in their twenties. This childish fantasy, however, indicates a genuine yearning for care and love in a relationship.
“Smoke Signals” is also one of the most musically developed tracks on the album with its string orchestra, wailing synth melody, and twangy guitar riffs. Another highlight is “Scott Street,” which builds a rich texture through an extensive palette of sound effects, from a soaring plane to a fire alarm. The rest of the album is well-produced but not as sonically diverse as Bridgers’s Grammy-nominated sophomore album “Punisher.” In fact, relistening to her debut record may leave fans a little disappointed. A standard folk-rock template is discernible across the eleven songs — sparse guitar chords swell with the addition of synth pads, heavier percussion, and layered vocals for the chorus. Additionally, the album closer “You Missed My Heart” is a cover of a Sun Kil Moon song. Bridgers’s interpretation is poignant but lacks the creativity of “Punisher”’s closer “I Know the End.”
After “Stranger in the Alps”’s warm reception, Phoebe Bridgers became one of the most promising new faces in indie music. Though impressive by itself, perhaps the album’s greatest contribution to her career was creating opportunities for collaboration. In the months following Bridgers’s 2017 debut, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker released critically acclaimed albums of their own — Dacus’s “Historian” and Baker’s “Turn Out the Lights”. The fortuitous timing of their releases caused many to highlight the similarities between the artists – all three are young women who write folk-rock songs with sad lyrics. Collaboration, not competition, arose as the artists formed the group boygenius and put out an eponymous record in 2018. The group stated that they aspired to challenge the archetype of the solitary “boy genius,” embodied by Bob Dylan and Elliott Smith. They succeeded. Their beautiful harmonies mesh perfectly to produce a powerful choral texture rarely seen in indie-rock. It’s clear that Bridgers used the album to push her musical creativity, as she experiments with arrangement techniques and tests her vocal range with the group.
The other major collaboration to arise out of “Stranger in the Alps” is Better Oblivion Community Center, Bridgers’s superduo with legendary Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst. The two met at a show in 2016, and Oberst agreed to provide backing vocals for “Would You Rather” on “Stranger in the Alps”. They released an eponymous label as Better Oblivion Community Center in 2019. This collaboration also saw Bridgers expand her sonic toolbox. The record is more upbeat than most of Bridgers’s songs, featuring driving folk melodies with satirical lyrics.
Artistically, these collaborations helped Bridgers build on the foundation she laid with her first album to create a more complex musical voice for “Punisher”. The album takes inspiration from Dacus’s driving rock rhythms, Baker’s deft banjo-playing, and Oberst’s love for sweeping orchestration. It retains the pensive and melancholic spirit of “Stranger in the Alps,” but packages it in a more sonically interesting way. It’s no wonder that “Punisher” is considered one of the best albums of the past few years.
Bridgers’s knack for bringing artists together has also made her a spokesperson and guardian spirit for indie music. Projects with mainstream artists like Kid Cudi, The 1975, and Taylor Swift have recruited a larger “pharb” fan base and brought attention to smaller-name artists associated with Bridgers. It’s rare to find an “indie” playlist on Spotify that doesn’t contain a Phoebe Bridgers song.
She also maintains the do-it-yourself ethos of independent music-making through Saddest Factory Records, the label she formed with Dead Oceans this past year. The label's signees range from the fan-favorite pop group MUNA to the experimental punk group Sloppy Jane. All of Saddest Factory’s artists have roots in L.A. — Sloppy Jane’s frontwoman Haley Dahl was in a band with Bridgers in high school — and the tight-knit group feels like an artists’ collective. “The label itself is a community, but I also feel like the listener is [part] of it. I see them interacting with each other in a way that feels more organic, sincere, and excited,” Dahl said in an interview with Flood Magazine.
At the end of “Scott Street,” Bridgers repeats over and over, “Anyway, don’t be a stranger.” She truly has taken this mantra to heart as an indie artist who enjoys widespread success.
