During the month of June, Teen Vogue is celebrating rising music stars who transcend genres. Through in-depth profiles, we're highlighting artists who make songs our readers should know and will love.

Name: Phoebe Bridgers

Age: 24

Hometown: Los Angeles, California

Phoebe Bridgers recently got an email from Matt Berninger, lead singer for The National. He had heard she was working on her second album, and he had some wisdom about the stress of that process: “He was like, ‘Yo, timelines don't exist. They're completely arbitrary,’” Phoebe tells Teen Vogue.

The idea of a timeline is something 24-year-old Phoebe thinks about a lot. The singer/songwriter and Los Angeles native released her critically-acclaimed debut Stranger in the Alps back in 2017, an album full of gut-wrenching poetry about douche-y past loves, taking nude photos, and, of course, death. In the intervening years she has somewhat unintentionally focused on collaborations — she’s one-third of the supergroup boygenius with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, and teamed up with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst on their recent project, Better Oblivion Community Center. She recently finished production on the upcoming album from another one of her friends and collaborators, Christian Lee Hutson, which also marked her first time producing music that wasn’t her own.

Now, two years after Stranger in the Alps, she’s turning her attention to her follow-up record, which she’s currently working on in L.A. “I'm just writing and taking a step back from everything to see what it all looks like,” she says. In the past, that process of finding out what her work is about has continued well into the promotional cycle for the album, long after a given song has been written and recorded. Time is a construct, etc etc.

“A lot of people wait five years put up the next record. I don't think that's going to happen, but I invented this pressure to put on myself, to put something out soon and make it great, when it should just be great and I should just feel good about it. Why would you rush to put something out?” she asks. “There is nothing more useless than an album that you don't feel strongly about, out in the world.”

It’s hard to imagine a useless Phoebe Bridgers album, since the idea of “feeling strongly” is an inadvertently good descriptor of what her music communicates, and what it’s like to listen to it. On early songs like “Motion Sickness” and “Scott Street,” she uses extremely specific details — transcripts of conversations, dollar amounts spent on a hypnotherapist — that combined with her whispery falsetto and folky arrangements create a closeness with the listener, like a friend sharing her frustrations. “The more specific you are about a very general feeling of loneliness is actually how you connect with people,” she says of her songwriting.

Phoebe’s connections with her aforementioned collaborators has helped her tap into previously unexplored parts of her abilities. As she collaborates, she learns their habits, developing the ones she wants to emulate. From Lucy, she admires the “metaphorical” nature of her work, the way she can weave a story into a song without you knowing it’s there. Julien is turning her into “a pedal nerd,” with a desire to write on every instrument. Conor has an easiness to song making — “all he needs is a rhyme scheme and a melody and he doesn't even have to say it out loud, he'll have the whole verse written.”

It doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that whatever Phoebe releases next, whenever she releases it, will be the result of this time of intense coworking, and of the past couple years of touring by herself and with her other projects. She’s learned more about her work style (“Sometimes I just need somebody to tell me a bunch of ideas I don't like, so that I can figure out what it is I actually want.”) while also developing a creative corner of trusted musicians to be inspired by.

In the meantime, she’s calming any lingering anxiety about the timing of what’s next by imagining worst-case scenarios. “Worst case scenario is that I go into the studio to record a bunch of songs and then six months later I'm like, ‘Oh my God, I hate it!’” Phoebe says. “So I trash it. And then I do it again.”

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