For years now, Alice Phoebe Lou has been at the cornerstone of the whimsical indie-pop-folk zeitgeist. Far from busking on the cobblestone streets of Berlin after high school, Phoebe Lou’s music retains the same intimacy now as it had thirteen years ago. The whistly jangle of her prior songs have done its time, and now, Alice Phoebe Lou is stripping love down to its bones. Oblivion is raw and familiar. In a world where love is deeply convoluted, she plays it as it lays. Across eleven tracks, Phoebe Lou uses only four instruments: A bulk of the album is given life exclusively with acoustic guitar and her honeyed vocals, sometimes further immersed by light piano and synth accompaniment scattered throughout selected tracks for the reintroduction of Alice Phoebe Lou’s idiosyncratic wonder. Oblivion is a letter to her changing, devoted, hopeless romantic self, written as a foundation and home for when she didn’t have one.
A growing maturity in Oblivion is evident, yet there remains the still resonance that is continuing by her lover’s side. Lou’s mellow, piano-driven track titled “Sparkle” boils the album’s journey through a single lyric: “In a blink of an eye/I have metamorphosized.” Oblivion is timelessly poetic, reminiscent of the esteemed words of Nick Drake and the stripped-down romantic melancholy of Elliott Smith, but prevails distinctly as Alice’s own. In this honored lineage of confessional and introspective songwriters, Phoebe Lou stands as a modern heir to their quiet intensity. She channels the fragile intimacy that is overt in the works of the solitary poet-musicians and brings it to a new era of grounded femininity.
The lyrics on Oblivion’s final track, “With or Without,” are barebones, moving between just four words. Lou’s vocal intonation begins with a steady calm centering an acoustic guitar at the forefront of the track. Approaching the halfway mark and we’ve reached the climax. A deep richness overcomes Lou’s voice in a desperate imploration that feels almost too personal. It strays from an acoustic groundedness and is something rather ambient and ephemeral. The track ends on the authenticity it started on, indisputably marking its conclusion. It’s an endearing ode to the uncertainty that comes with plucking petals off a flower: He loves me, he loves me not.
Phoebe Lou knows about the inevitability of transformation in life as it is in Oblivion. “Mind Reader” is deliberately muffled and intimately conversational with an acoustic guitar as its only backing, reading like a postcard to an overseas lover. It relies on the inner-workings of another, the entanglement of mind and soul. “Pretender” ends on a note that instead relies on herself, breeding in realization and acceptance: And despite these changes, Oblivion remains whole.
Love and learning to accept the change that comes with it is infamously enigmatic, but it becomes an easier pill to swallow when its complexity is genuine and emphatically unvarnished. Alice Phoebe Lou in Oblivion distracts from the chaos and pandemonium that is the outside world and brings us something from strictly within. Her newest album isn’t demanding and instead flows with the wind of dynamic uncertainty and recollection of the self and her cherished.