Alice Phoebe Lou, key figure of indie folk, tells all her secrets

par Alexis Thibault.

Published on 8 September 2025. Updated on 15 September 2025.

The sweet revolt of singer Alice Phoebe Lou

Alice Phoebe Lou has the look of a girl next door with whom we could fall in love from the beginning of her performance at the back of a crowded pub. The scene is worthy of an American romantic comedy. Some come to quench their thirst at the counter, others to share some gossip, exhausted by their a long day of work.

They will eventually attend the brilliant and unexpected concert of a defender of indie folk whose music sometimes looks at the blues and skilfully extricates itself from the expectations of popular works… Yes, Alice Phoebe Lou could put any assembly in her pocket. Shy chicks, virile financiers and deconstructed hipsters…

With her deceptively naïve compositions and imperfect authenticity, the 31-year-old singer from South Africa is actually happy to tell stories through sounds. But his tales, such as Better, his latest track, never escape the idea of a cycle, a circle, an infernal and hypnotic spiral. Indeed, Alice Phoebe Lou evokes radiant and dreary lives, the ups and downs of existence, the beginnings and endings of love stories, while tearing apart monstrous men.

Oblivion: Alice Phoebe Lou’s new album

And it is surely for this reason that her compositions stand out from the crowd: the young woman recognizes and underlines her own flaws to better transcribe them as they are at the heart of her music, letting each of her past mistakes infuse into her sweet folk. This is evidenced by the first words of his track Open My Door, one of his most beautiful tracks released in 2023 but composed ten years ago now: ” I used to open my door to anyone who was looking for a place to feel safe. But I’ve made my world safer for everyone… except for me. ”

After the majestic Shelter in 2023, even the idea of taking things a step further could have felt paralyzing. Instead of aiming for sonic escalation or any type of one-upmanship expected by the industry, Alice Phoebe Lou opted for the opposite – a retreat, a dive back into her own intimate groove. “I wanted to return to my roots, to playing music in the streets,” she explains.

Oblivion, her sixth album, due out on October 24th, emerges as a kind of secret library. Songs long kept hidden, left out of previous projects, sometimes even deemed too fragile to be released. She recorded them in their barest form, almost on the go, with the playfulness and tenderness of an artist unafraid of imperfection. Where Shelter was built up in layers, Oblivion only keeps the essentials – guitar, voice, breath. This simplicity is not a step backward but an aesthetic choice, bringing the listener closer to the lyrics and pulse of human vibration.

From South Africa to the alleys of Berlin

The daughter of documentary filmmakers, Alice Phoebe Lou grew up in Kommetjie, a small suburb located in the west of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A seaside town whose name means “small pool” in Afrikaans – the Dutch language spoken in South Africa – which is distinguished above all by its white lighthouse called Slangkop. The musician remembers the long, winding path that stretched along the side of the nearby hill, and her house, an atypical house that she herself described as “a bit eccentric”.

At the age of 19, she moved to Berlin, and from there began to perform with her guitar in the streets of various European cities. It was not until 2014 that Momentum, his first self-financed EP, was discovered. This was followed by Orbit (2016), then Paper Castles (2019) – critically acclaimed –, Glow (2021), Child’s Play (2021), recorded on Canadian Vancouver Island, and Shelter (2023).

Gentle revolts and automatic writing

Over time, Alice Phoebe Lou has become the architect of music with deeply theatrical lyrics and minimalist arrangements. His revolts are gentle and his voice ethereal. “I would like to break with the mainstream expectation of music that must be perfect and universally appreciated,” she admits, smiling. As an independent artist, I think I can afford to play with imperfection…”

The South African has never taken traditional classes and therefore does not really know music theory. But what could academicism bring him when his own mother, a self-taught musician, has always created “intuitively, a bit like that“.

Alice Phoebe Lou has therefore adopted a similar method and focuses more on expression than on rules. “My creative process is based on improvisation and automatic writing. I let the words spring out spontaneously. It’s embarrassing sometimes. In these uncontrolled moments, what emerges can be very personal, uncomfortable, even awkward… ”

This writing process forms the basis of the literary practice of Surrealism. In 1924, in his Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton used the expression “automatic writing” to designate no longer the result of the trance that would put the medium in communication with the spirits, but the texts that a poet would be likely to produce by trying to escape all rational control. By combining this technique with the work of the philosopher and psychiatrist Pierre Janet, Surrealism opens a door to an alternative world, a creation of thought that escapes reason as well as any aesthetic or moral concerns.

A tour alongside the singer Clairo

In 2024, Alice Phoebe Lou performed as the opening act for her American counterpart Clairo, whose Charm (2024), her third soft rock album, praises the LO-FI genre (deliberately dirty underground sound production) and the do-it-yourself aesthetic, taking with it an agoraphobic Generation Z eager for hushed pop, tender lyrics and subdued light. But Alice Phoebe Lou does not want to become Clairo. “Celebrity distorts existences. It’s horrible. Who could find this life pleasant? “Becoming an artist isolates you. Becoming an artist disconnects you from the world.

His musical universe condenses the fantasies of the ethno-jazz singer and activist Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), the incantatory poetry of Patti Smith, marked by the figures of the Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs…) and the raging and rough rock of the unpredictable PJ Harvey, a British artist fascinated by nature.

A joyful critique of patriarchy

To date, however, Alice Phoebe Lou’s most popular tracks remain Witches (2020), Only When I (2021) or the hard-hitting Dirty Mouth (2021) – the video for which was shot in Kommetjie – which carries a joyful and welcome criticism of patriarchy: “I’ve had several experiences with weird men… The idea of opening up my world too much to others now makes me quite nervous. Dirty Mouth is inspired by these extremely difficult experiences. But it’s also a way of showing victims of sexual assault, for example, that we can recover what has been taken from us, that we can still overcome this. ”

This year, Alice Phoebe Lou will open for another singer, this time from Californian pop. It is Rémi Wolf. She will accompany him on the stage of the mythical Red Rocks Amphitheatre, an impressive open-air theater in the state of Colorado where the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Daft Punk have performed.

Oblivion by Alice Phoebe Lou, available on October 24th, 2025.