Phoebe Bridgers' Comeback: For the Girls Who Spent Their Teenage Years Sad

Six years after her sophomore album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers has finally released the lead single to her new album coming August 14th. Her solo music is known for its melancholy, reflective lyrics, as are her collaborations with close friends and similar musicians Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker under the band name boygenius. 

As someone who used Phoebe Bridger’s music as a simultaneous comfort blanket and means of crying during high school, it has been consoling to my sixteen year old self to see how many people have had the same experience. Her comeback has sparked a trend on social media; a current picture saying, “the girl who is excited for Phoebe Bridgers to come back” and an older one, “who’s really listening.” This struck such a cord with me, to see everyone else’s older picture being them in their school uniform, post-pandemic masks, wired headphones. It seems like it was a universal experience for girls who hated school and spent years 10-11 sad and lonely to run Phoebe’s two album discography into the ground, living with a motto of “know it’s for the better.” 

In 2026 now, at 20, that sad teenager still lives inside of me and shows her face when Phoebe comes on. It’s a mix of nostalgia and fondness; remembering how sad I used to be, but how the music resonated so deeply that it helped me grow. I think the two concerts of hers that I’ve secured tickets for will heal something within me, beyond experiencing songs I’ve loved for years live for the first time. My favourite Phoebe lyric is one I feel I have grown up alongside and understand more now than I did at sixteen,

“I don’t know how, but I’m taller. It must be something in the water. Everything’s growing in our garden, you don’t have to know that it’s haunted. The doctor put her hands over my liver, she told me my resentment’s getting smaller.” 

All of this teenage angst prompts the question: how will the new album be received now we are in our twenties, without all of these memories attached to it? Will it be healing, or feel like something is missing? I think it will be like a love letter to our teenage selves, to the dormant sadness that lives within us, proof of how far we’ve come, just like Phoebe herself says, “It never goes away, but it all works out.” 

Written by, Rosie James