I Know The End

"I Know The End" began life as a breakup song written by Phoebe Bridgers with her touring drummer and ex-boyfriend, Marshall Vore, about the end of their relationship. They started it around the same time as "I See You," another Punisher track about their split.

The original lyric was about Bridgers' depression following their breakup. However, her heartbreak turned into a tour-related depression, so the songstress reworked the track, transforming it into a metal song about driving away to northern California where her grandparents used to live. Bridgers inserted an apocalyptic outro, which represented the undercurrent of doom that she was feeling. It climaxes with an almighty scream. She told Apple Music: "This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I've done a lot in my life. It's like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn't exist when I'm doing it, like I can't differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north."

Bridgers abstracts the breakup story by paralleling it with America's heartache. She explained to The Forty Five the references to bolts of lightning, and billboards that say "the end is near" in the song's stormbound climax are "just political. Like, in the United States, there are still children being detained at the border. I just was like, humanity needs to die. I was just feeling really dark."