If you like Phoebe Bridgers, go listen to Samia, Adrianne Lenker, Leith Ross, Ethel Cain, Christian Lee Hutson and Genevieve Stokes. What they share with her is the habit of putting a real name, a real place or a bad joke into a sad song and trusting you to feel the rest. One of them made his first album with her in the producer's chair. Here they are one at a time, with songs to start on.
Who sounds like Phoebe Bridgers?
1. Samia: the friend who tells you everything
Samia writes the way Phoebe Bridgers does on Punisher: names, places, and a joke sitting right next to the hurt. "Big Wheel" is a list of what she has got, bug bites and an old friend in Japan and a man in Montana who just admitted he lied a year ago. Halfway through comes "I understand the thing you did / And every reason you did it," and straight after it, "But I'm so mad dude." That is "Jesus Christ, I'm so blue all the time" territory. "Pool" opens with a rhyme in Arabic built around her own name before it turns into a love song. Start with The Baby (2020), then go to Bloodless (2025).
Start with:
- Pool (2020)
- Big Wheel (2020)
- Bovine Excision (2025)
2. Adrianne Lenker: for when "Moon Song" is the one
Big Thief's singer on her own. In the spring of 2020 she recorded songs in a one-room cabin in Westhampton, Massachusetts, and you can hear the room: one voice, one guitar, wood all around. "anything" builds a whole relationship out of details, a mango, jeans on a clothespin, a dog bite on Christmas Eve that ends in the ER, the way "Moon Song" builds one out of John Lennon and "Tears in Heaven." Then the chorus asks for something plain: "I wanna sleep in your car while you're driving." Bright Future (2024), recorded live to tape with three friends, is the one to hear next.
Start with:
- anything (2020)
- not a lot, just forever (2020)
- forwards beckon rebound (2020)
3. Leith Ross: the whisper that got everywhere
"We'll Never Have Sex" took off in the summer of 2021, and it is easy to hear why. It is a love song about tenderness that asks for nothing back: "Oh, you kissed me just to kiss me / Not to take me home." Leith sings it barely above a speaking voice. To Learn (2023) is the album it lives on, and I Can See The Future (2025) opens the sound up without losing that closeness. Headphones, late, on your own: that is how these songs want to be heard.
Start with:
- We'll Never Have Sex (2023)
- (You) On My Arm (2023)
- I'd Have To Think About It (2021)
4. Ethel Cain: the long, slow, American one
The biggest sound on this list and the longest songs. Preacher's Daughter (2022) tells one story across an hour and a quarter, and "American Teenager" is the way in: a high school football town, the neighbor's brother who "came home in a box," and a chorus about "crying in the bleachers" that you will be singing before you notice what it says. Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You (2025) goes back to before that story starts. If your favourite Phoebe Bridgers moment is the end of "I Know The End," when the song stops being a folk song and turns into noise, Ethel Cain lives there.
Start with:
- Crush (2021)
- American Teenager (2022)
- Strangers (2022)
5. Christian Lee Hutson: the one Phoebe produced
Bridgers produced his 2020 album Beginners at Sound City in Los Angeles, and it was one of the records she picked when Amoeba filmed her at home that summer. Hutson writes long, talky verses that are funny for most of their length and then, in one line, very sad. "Northsiders" is a teenage friendship told as a list, "Morrissey apologists / Amateur psychologists," and in the last verse the narrator reads about the accident and says, "I hope it was an instant death." If "Funeral" is your Phoebe song, I would start here. Paradise Pop. 10 (2024) is his latest.
Start with:
- Lose This Number (2020)
- Northsiders (2020)
- After Hours (2024)
6. Genevieve Stokes: the find
A piano songwriter whose biggest song, "Habits," has the line a lot of Phoebe fans will recognise from their own lives: "It's always right person and wrong way." "Surface Tension" opens with "I'm missing people I've never met," which is about as Phoebe Bridgers as a first line gets. Hiding Places (2026) is her new album and the right place to start.
Start with:
- Habits (2022)
- Surface Tension (2021)
- Lonely and Bored (2021)
Read our take on Never in Love.
What Phoebe Bridgers listens to
In June 2020 Amoeba filmed Bridgers at home for What's In My Bag?, and the records she picked were Christian Lee Hutson's Beginners, Joanna Sternberg's Then I Try Some More, Lala Lala's The Lamb, Elliott Smith's New Moon and Bright Eyes' Cassadaga.
Elliott Smith is the big one. She told NPR that year that his music is "like The Beatles to me, and I mean that in every way," and that the production trick she always takes from him is double-tracking the vocal. Bright Eyes runs the other way too: Conor Oberst sang on Stranger in the Alps, and the two of them made the Better Oblivion Community Center album together in 2019. Elliott Smith to Bright Eyes to Phoebe Bridgers to the six names above is a straight line.
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