Phoebe Bridgers released her excellent sophomore album Punisher in June of 2020, shortly after the world went into an 18-month-long lockdown. The timing could've caused Phoebe's steady rise to flatten, but instead her rise became even more meteoric, and over the next year she turned an SNL appearance into a cultural moment, picked up four Grammy nominations, and sang on a Taylor Swift album, just to name a few things. That all culminated in her headlining 2022 tour, which wrapped up in NYC with two sold-out Prospect Park shows, followed by a very full crowd at the even bigger Forest Hills Stadium on Thursday night (6/16), which, as Phoebe mentioned on stage, was her biggest show to date. The intense lines to enter the venue and buy merch, the crush of people at the barricade, and the fans singing along to every word of every song; those are all part of the Phoebe Bridgers live experience now. She acknowledged the enormity of the setting onstage to huge cheers, thanking her entire tour crew, from drivers and techs to bandmates and her dog Maxine, sorted by astrological sign, of course, for allowing her to have such an easy time on this outing.
No matter how big she's gotten, Phoebe's music still has an incredible power to connect and make even a cavernous stadium feel intimate. She used the space to her advantage, adding video art that straddles the line between whimsical and macabre, featuring locations that look like they're constructed of paper folded out of books, and with lots of the aesthetic touchstones of her material: skeletons, stained glass, the moon. The latter, taking over the backdrop during the end of "Moon Song," made for an iconic visual moment that's already become the stuff of lots of Instagram posts: Phoebe and her guitar, silhouetted against the full moon.