The metrics of musical success are in constant flux. You know you’ve done good work, though, when your song ends up on a Barack Obama end-of-year list. Faye Webster’s song Better Distractions made the cut in 2020. A classy country-soul number about adjusting to heartbreak, it finally catapulted this exquisite Atlanta singer-songwriter into national – and international – attention.

The Atlanta connection is pivotal to this artist’s sound, a bruised sweet spot where Americana often meets vintage R&B. Natalie Prass is a reference point, as is Frazey Ford. But Webster has a crunch and swagger all her own.

Now 23, the dulcet-voiced Webster grew up hip-hop, working as a photographer to her native city’s motherlode of stars – Offset from Migos; her schoolfriend Lil Yachty – while still a teenager. Her second album came out on Awful Records, home of Playboi Carti. The video for her recent single, Cheers, features Atlanta off-road bikers pulling wheelies in the same underpass Migos used for the video of their 2016 smash hit Bad and Boujee.

Webster’s recently released fourth and best album, I Know I’m Funny haha, kicks off with that Obama jam and only grows more assured. Elegant strings glide across tunes such as A Stranger; horns toot pensively at the back of A Dream With a Baseball Player. A writer of perfect miniatures, Webster has a gift for making matter-of-fact observations sound fathoms deep. “You make me cry in a good way,” she sings on In a Good Way; the same could be said of her own fine work.

• I Know I’m Funny haha is out now on Secretly Canadian