Phoebe Bridgers @ Soup Kitchen, Manchester, 18 Oct

23-year-old Californian Phoebe Bridgers' songs are shot through with a deep-seated sadness – the kind that it takes mere chance to know and to comprehend, but a poet’s heart and soul to investigate, craft and communicate. Motion Sickness, the track that trailed debut album Stranger in the Alps, features the kind of snappy groove and fuzzy guitars that draw a line back to the 90s US alt scene. But it proved to be a stylistic decoy: the only semi-banger on a record that keeps the stakes high by keeping the volume low. Indeed, when Bridgers closes her first UK headline show with it tonight, the song’s core is revealed, and that inescapable hook ('I have emotional motion sickness / Somebody roll the windows down'), which might have initially come off as a little arch, is suddenly revealed as perceptive, shrewd and true.

Bridgers, accompanied on guitar by friend and collaborator Harrison Whitford, is a compelling live presence, and she undercuts the sombre tone with expertly delivered asides. She brings the house down when she accuses Whitford – modelling de rigueur thrift store threads – of looking like “the bad guy in a Wes Anderson movie”, but she saves her best punchlines for her own material. 

Bridgers straps on an electric guitar for Chelsea but cautions a lone whoop: “Yeah, well it looks exciting but it’s actually getting more miserable.” She’s not kidding – the song, a brooding dissection of mortality, is a showcase for Bridgers' elegant wordplay. 'Your revolution is a deathbed, and the music is your maid,' she breathes, and it’s not just the reference to the Chelsea Hotel at the song’s climax that puts one in mind of Leonard Cohen: a writer whose angular and storied poetics are already perfectly reasonable reference points for Bridgers’ developing vision. 

Album high spot Funeral ('Jesus Christ, I'm so blue all the time') is unsparing: a tale of small-town life (and death) sketched in almost unbearable detail. Two canny covers complement a – for the moment – thin songbook. Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees is an ersatz anthem that resists overselling, and Bridgers shrinks it, keeping it in close focus. 

But it’s a spare and sympathetic revisiting of Tom Petty’s It’ll All Work Out that is a clearer indicator of her spirit and personal history. As a tribute to the recently deceased singer, it’s deftly judged but, as Bridgers introduces the song with a bitter swipe at Donald Trump, it emerges as a simple rallying call and a hope for something better. Amidst the desolation of her originals, it’s an oddly bittersweet tonic – a reminder that while we know it’s the sad songs (and the security of knowing we have those that dare write them) that keep us alive, every now and then we need someone with heart enough to try to convince us otherwise. The greats are disappearing at an alarming rate. Thankfully, the new ones just keep on coming.