Alice Phoebe Lou

From the venue:

Alice Phoebe Lou started playing music as a busker after moving from South Africa to Berlin in 2012 and falling in love with a lifestyle that could be so self-determined. At first, it was just a way to earn enough money to pay rent but it quickly evolved into something more. Busking, she explains, “is hard and fucking humiliating. People will shout at you, men will harass you, competition for a spot to perform can be vicious ... I had countless situations where people were just the worst. But then you have those shining moments where you genuinely move somebody. I knew that if I worked on my music, it could be something beautiful.”

Debut album Orbit came in 2016 and saw Alice “piece together the possibility” of music turning into a proper career while 2019’s Paper Castles cemented her as a talented, exciting musician. With a busker’s mentality about needing to win people over immediately, Alice only gave herself “permission to write without the fear of judgment” on 2021’s Glow. That record and surprise follow-up Child’s Play allowed Alice to go “super deep and vulnerable. I think people really connected with me speaking about personal, painful, tragic things that sometimes feel too embarrassing to say out loud,” she explains. “Those two albums felt like a reckoning.”