Song You Need to Know: Faye Webster, ‘Room Temperature’

“Looks like I’ve been crying again over the same thing,” Faye Webster confesses over a breezy steel guitar, making for a really depressing luau. “I wonder if anyone has ever cried for me.” In “Room Temperature,” the second single off her upcoming album Atlanta Millionaires Club, you can’t help but share in Webster’s lackadaisical loneliness. Her dewy, subdued vocals keep repeating the same truth, crashing harder than waves on a beach: “I should get out more.”

The 21-year-old singer has a natural ability to fuse indie-folk with laid-back R&B. Raised in Atlanta, Webster came up in the hip-hop scene as a teenager and released her self-titled 2017 debut on local label Awful Records (best known for outré rappers and singers including Father, Abra and Playboi Carti). Two years later, on “Room Temperature,” Webster has fine-tuned her introspective songwriting, using minimal lines to express herself, however bleak it might sound: “I just don’t change that much ’cause who’s to impress? There’s nobody around when I’m at my best.”

According to Webster, “Room Temperature” is a new approach for her. “This was the first time I wrote a song solely about myself,” she tells Rolling Stone. “Which was refreshing because it wasn’t for anyone except me.”