Kommetjie, ZA · indie-folk · dream-pop · dream-folk · indie

Alice Phoebe Lou

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Berlin-via-Cape Town dream-folk — honeyed, unhurried songs that grew from street-performance beginnings into a quietly devoted worldwide fanbase.

Alice Phoebe Lou grew up in Kommetjie on South Africa's Cape Peninsula, the daughter of documentary filmmakers, and attended a Waldorf school. She took piano and guitar lessons as a child, developed a fondness for trance music in her early teens, and started photographing concerts, sometimes for pay. Her early listening ran to Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Portishead.

After finishing school in 2012 she spent a year in Europe, first fire-dancing in Paris and then, after finding singing more lucrative, playing guitar on the streets, in parks and on train platforms in Berlin. She has lived in Berlin since she was nineteen, based in the district of Neukölln, and turned down early record-label offers to keep releasing music independently.

She has released six self-funded studio albums: Orbit (2016), Paper Castles (2019), Glow and Child's Play (both 2021), Shelter (2023) and Oblivion (2025), alongside two live albums and several EPs. Since 2019 she has also recorded as one half of the duo Strongboi with her band's keyboardist.

Her songs tend toward soft, slightly hazy arrangements: clean electric guitar, brushed drums, occasional strings, with her light, breathy voice at the centre. The writing moves between folk directness and looser, dreamier textures, and she often sings in a jazz-inflected phrasing that sits at odds with the pop structures underneath.

Her song 'She', written for the film Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, was shortlisted for the Best Original Song Academy Award. Early notice came from a 2014 TEDx Berlin performance and repeated appearances at South by Southwest from 2015 onward, well before wider attention followed.

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