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

The gentle rebellion of singer Alice Phoebe Lou

Alice Phoebe Lou has the face of the “girl-next-door” you could fall in love with as soon as she starts performing in a crowded pub. The scene is worthy of an American romantic comedy. Some came here to quench their thirst at the bar, while others came to gossip a bit after a long, exhausting day of work.

In the end, they would all be treated to a brilliant and unexpected concert by an advocate of indie folk whose music sometimes veers off onto blues and skillfully breaks free from the expectations of popular songs… Yes, Alice Phoebe Lou could get any crowd to like her, from shy chicks to powerful financiers and woke hipsters…

With her deceptively naïve compositions and imperfect authenticity, the 31-year-old South African-born singer is really just telling stories with sounds. But her tales never escape the idea of a cycle, a circle, a hypnotic, infernal spiral, like her latest track Better. For Alice Phoebe Lou conjures up radiant and dreary lives, ups and downs, beginnings and endings of love stories, all the while lambasting monstrous men.

That’s probably why her compositions stand out from the rest – the young woman recognises and emphasizes her own shortcomings in order to better translate them as they are in her music, allowing each one of her past mistakes to infuse her sweet, intoxicating folk. The opening lyrics of her 2023 song Open My Door, one of her most beautiful tracks that she wrote ten years ago, bear witness to that idea: “I used to open my door to pretty much anyone who was tryna look for a place to feel safe. But I made my whole world safer for everyone but me.”

From South Africa to the streets of Berlin

Alice Phoebe Lou is the daughter of documentary filmmakers and grew up in Kommetjie, a small suburban town down the west coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. The name of this seaside town means “small basin” in Afrikaans – the Dutch language spoken in South Africa – and it is best known for ‘Slangkop’, its white lighthouse. The musician remembers the long, winding road that stretched along the side of the neighbouring hill, and her house, an atypical home that she describes as “a bit eccentric”.

At the age of 19, she moved to Berlin and started performing in the streets of various European cities with her guitar. It wasn’t until 2014 that she released Momentum, her first self-financed EP. This was followed by Orbit (2016), then by the critically-acclaimed Paper Castles (2019), by Glow (2021), Child’s Play (2021), recorded on the Canadian island of Vancouver, and eventually by Shelter (2023).

Soft rebellions and automatic writing

Over the years, Alice Phoebe Lou has become the architect of a music marked by deeply theatrical lyrics and minimalist arrangements. Her rebellions are gentle and her voice ethereal. “I’d like to break away from the mainstream expectation that music should be perfect and universally appreciated,” she recognizes with a smile on her face. “As an independent artist, I think I can afford to play with imperfection…”

The South African singer never received any traditional musical education, so she doesn’t know much about music theory. Yet, what could academic music bring to her when her own mother, a self-taught musician, has always created “in an intuitive way, just like that”?

Alice Phoebe Lou has adopted a similar method, focusing more on expression than on rules. “My creative process is based on improvisation and automatic writing. I let the words flow naturally. It can sometimes be embarrassing. In these uncontrolled moments, what emerges can be very personal, uncomfortable, even clumsy…”

This writing process was the root of the Surrealist art movement. In 1924, André Breton used the expression “automatic writing” in his Manifesto of Surrealism to define, not the result of a trance that would put the medium in communication with spirits, but the texts that a poet might create in an attempt to break free from all rational control. By combining this technique with the work of the philosopher and psychiatrist Pierre Janet, Surrealism opened the door to an alternative world, a creation of thought that goes beyond rational thinking or any aesthetic and moral concerns.

A music tour alongside singer Clairo

In 2024, Alice Phoebe Lou was the opening act of her American counterpart Clairo, whose third soft rock album, Charm (2024), overpraised the LO-FI genre with a deliberately dirty underground sound production, as well as the do-it-yourself aesthetic. The latter invited an agoraphobic generation Z crowd, hungry for a toned-down pop, tender lyrics and subdued lights, to embark on her journey. However, Alice Phoebe Lou has no desire to become Clairo. “Fame distorts people’s lives. It’s awful. Who could find this life pleasant? Becoming an artist isolates you. Becoming an artist disconnects you from the world.”

Her musical universe is the perfect blend of the fantasies of ethno-jazz singer and activist Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), the incantatory poetry of Patti Smith, influenced by the figures of the Beat generation – Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs – and the raging, rough rock music of the unpredictable PJ Harvey, a British artist fascinated by nature.

A light-hearted critique of patriarchy

Alice Phoebe Lou’s most popular songs to date remain Witches (2020), Only When I (2021) or the powerful Dirty Mouth (2021) with its video shot in Kommetjie, which is a joyful and very much welcome criticism of patriarchy: “I’ve had many experiences with weird men… The idea of opening up my world too much to other people makes me quite nervous now. Dirty Mouth is inspired by these extremely difficult experiences. It’s also a way of showing victims of sexual assault, for instance, that you can take back what was stolen from you, that you can still overcome it.”

This year, Alice Phoebe Lou will be supporting another artist, this time the Californian pop singer Remi Wolf. She will be performing with him on the stage of the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre, an impressive open-air theatre in Colorado where the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Daft Punk have played.

Better (2024) by Alice Phoebe Lou, available now.

Traduction Emma Naroumbo Armaing.