Faye Webster

“People think I’m a really sad person, which I guess I kind of am,” Faye Webster told Apple Music, “but that’s the only time I feel like writing.” Certainly, the Atlanta singer-songwriter (born in 1997) has a real gift for distilling big emotions into intimate moments and cutting one-liners. Her 2019 debut for Secretly Canadian, Atlanta Millionaires Club, is loaded with deeply personal, pedal-steeled portraits like “Right Side of My Neck” (whose title is followed by the words “still smells like you”). But despite her seeming predilection for countrified indie-pop confessionals, her roots actually lie in Atlanta’s world-famous hip-hop scene. Raised in a family of musicians, Webster began performing at open-mic nights as she entered high school, before self-releasing her debut album, Run and Tell, at the age of 16. Her savvy songwriting and keep-it-real attitude endeared her to local rap imprint Awful Records, who released her self-titled follow-up in 2017. (The label’s figurehead MC, Father, would go on to drop rhymes on Atlanta Millionaires Club’s R&B detour “Flowers.”) Webster continued to fine-tune her fusion of country and soul while pushing her songwriting to new levels of frankness on 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha, which received invaluable pre-release buzz when Barack Obama included its elegant lead single, “Better Distractions,” on his Best of 2020 playlist. She nevertheless stuck close to her Atlanta hip-hop roots: “Lego Ring,” from 2024’s Underdressed at the Symphony, features her classmate Lil Yachty.