Alice Phoebe Lou

Hailing from South Africa, singer-songwriter Alice Matthew, who performs as Alice Phoebe Lou, commands attention with her singular voice and a sound that merges the dreamy intimacy of bedroom pop with folk, synth pop, jazz, and blues textures. Since surfacing in 2014 she has put out several EPs along with five studio albums: Orbit in 2016, Paper Castles in 2019, Glow in 2021, Child’s Play in 2021, and Shelter in 2023. The song “She,” which she contributed to the 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, earned a place on the Oscars shortlist for Best Original Song.

Born to two documentary filmmakers in the modest Cape Peninsula settlement of Kommetjie, Lou had become a multi-instrumentalist by age fourteen. She spent her early years busking across Europe, refining her craft before crowds in Berlin, the city she would later call home. Her first EP, Momentum, appeared as an independent self-release in 2014. Two years afterward came her debut full-length Orbit, which drew favorable notices from the German press and similar recognition in South Africa. The next year brought the EP Sola and the standalone single “She,” featured in the widely praised documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Paper Castles followed in 2019, highlighted by the lush hit single “Something Holy” and supported by wide-ranging international tours. Toward the end of that year she formed the lo-fi pop duo Strongboi with keyboardist Ziv Yamin. Like countless other musicians, Lou encountered a standstill in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic halted live work, yet her output continued after falling in love and then experiencing heartbreak; those experiences shaped the luminous 2021 album Glow and its unexpected year-end companion Child’s Play. In 2023 Strongboi issued its self-titled debut album while Lou delivered her reflective fifth studio set Shelter. The introspective single “The World Above” appeared on its own early the next year.