One of the things that strikes you about Allison Eide’s music is how it feels. Sitting between singer-songwriter intimacy and indie pop lift, it moves with an old-soul warmth and lands lines that sound like a late-night confession.
Her voice has grip and grain, close enough to whisper but strong enough to soar — the kind of tone that can talk you through a bad day and still punch up to a hook that stays with you.
If the CCM lane is a fluorescent aisle and bedroom pop is a night lamp, Eide flips both switches and invites you to sit on the floor.
When her viral single “IDK” started popping up on TikTok this year, it wasn’t because she optimized a trend. Fans stitched it to montages of breakups, faith crises and dorm-room spiral diaries because that’s where the song lives.
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“It’s wild,” she says. “I wrote it in my bedroom and suddenly it’s everywhere.”
For someone who hasn’t heard Eide’s music yet: think Olivia Rodrigo’s no-filter intimacy meeting a Ben Rector-level chorus, with writing that’s as direct as a text and shaped as a prayer.
Music was everywhere in Eide’s childhood home. “My dad was a Christian singer-songwriter,” she says. “He was independent his whole career but he was on the road touring, making lots of records.”
For Eide, it was normal to have instruments in the living room and notebooks across the table.
She taught herself piano and composed her first song at 6—jealous her older brother got lessons and she didn’t. By middle school she was singing on her dad’s records.
She also excelled in athletics, playing basketball at both Bethel University and the University of Northwestern. She was a self-proclaimed “singer-athlete,” giving her all to both passions.
After graduation she released her first single, “Love Who I Am,” in 2023, hoping for a few friendly or encouraging texts.
The internet had other plans.
“When I released my first single, I was literally a nobody in terms of any platform or fanbase,” she says. “And then the song went viral, which started it all.”
Unfortunately, it came at a hard time personally. Her dad had been diagnosed with cancer.
“It was confusing because my career started to go up and family life behind the scenes started to plummet,” she says. “It’s been like that ever since—a dichotomy of both happening at the same time.”
The plummet was her father’s health. The lift was the music. Through it all, she wrote with both hands on the wheel.
“Trying to understand the Lord while my dad was suffering—up until a little over a year ago when the Lord took him home—everything I thought I knew about God was swiped off my desk,” she says. “I was starting from scratch, asking, ‘God, who are you? Where are you? I have no clue.’”
Even the practices that once steadied her turned thorny.
“I felt like faith was at rock bottom,” she says. “I struggled with PTSD when I tried to read the Bible or sing worship songs. I went to therapy and realized those things triggered panic. So how am I supposed to connect with God if I can’t even do those things?”
So she wrote. Not to tidy up, but to breathe.
“I wrote songs trying to understand Jesus and they became very earnest,” she says. “‘IDK’ is part of that.”
Earlier this year, Eide released her debut album Love Who I Am. The title track, which was her initial viral single, introduced the Eide blueprint: piano-led cadence, no wasted lines, a chorus that blooms right when you need it. Her sound is marked by presence.
“Love Who I Am” climbs from self-loathing to belonging without pretending the climb is easy. “IDK” loops like a question you can’t shake and refuses resolution.
Eide’s earnestness predates grief. Since age 10 she has lived with obsessive compulsive disorder. Performance—stage or court—was the only place her mind didn’t turn on itself.
“I knew God loved me, I knew my parents loved me,” she says. “But in my mind, I didn’t know how to love me. I hated being me. My mind felt like my enemy.”
What kept her going was other people’s songs.
“The one thing that would keep me going, besides Jesus, was a song by some artist I connected with,” she says. “Something that would get me to the next day, or the next hour or the next week.”
Now she writes to hand that lifeline back.
“If I can write something that pulls someone into belonging, helps them realize Jesus is close in their mess and makes them feel less alone—if I can make a song like that, I’ve done my job.”
The industry context explains why her voice is cutting through. For decades, Christian music gatekeepers decided what was safe enough to play and sell.
But Gen Z finds songs in the wild. They trust the cracked places if the melody can hold.
“This day and age in music is crazy because the powers that be have never had less power,” she says. “Anyone can have a voice at any time and dominate the internet out of nowhere.
“The industry is in chaos a little bit,” she continued. “But it allows the Lord to have the most control now over what songs reach people. I think it’s cool that people get to have an unfiltered voice.”
She sees this new wave of Christian indie artists as a team sport. “It is an honor because everyone is popping off,” she says with a grin. “I’m like, y’all, let’s team up and do this.”
What keeps Eide steady isn’t a dashboard; it’s church. In Minneapolis she’s rooted in an Ethiopian congregation — drawn there by her brother’s adoption, kept there by the kind of community that grounds an artist and a person.
“If I wasn’t making music, I would probably be in Ethiopia right now,” she says. “My brother’s adopted from there. My home church is Ethiopian. I’ve loved the culture since I was a kid, and I would just be doing ministry work there.”
“In the best way, it has been the most grounding, life-giving part of my life,” she says. “Getting to go every week, be with this community and just serve, study the Bible with them, deal with crazy middle school boys—in the best way, it reminds me how good it is to be human and in the moment.”
Eide is also a cliff-jumper — literally — hurling 35 feet into Lake Superior for the shock of aliveness.
Her songs carry that same mix: fragile and fearless, rooted and ready to leap.
Strings & Heart
If Eide is the friend at your kitchen table, Strings & Heart is the backyard show you didn’t plan for, the one where the neighbors lean over the fence because the guitars sound like summer.
Tucson-raised brothers Angelo, Michael and Eric Espinosa make indie rock that grins—surf-bright strums, crisp drums, harmonies you can belt even on a bad day. The songs sprint toward hope but keep their shoelaces untied.
There was a time the Espinosa brothers wanted nothing to do with music. Lessons. Church bands. A family that had its own Christian rock group once upon a time. They were dragged to rehearsals, dutiful on keys and guitars, resentful the whole way.
“It was like, ‘If you’re going to do something, do it with all your heart,’” Angelo recalls, nodding at the family mantra that eventually became their band’s namesake. “At the time, we didn’t want to do it at all.”
In 2019, fresh off a jolt of faith, Angelo pitched a reset—no Sunday specials, no expectation to fit a slot—just a band. They called it Strings & Heart, cribbed from Psalm 150’s call to let every instrument praise.
They spent a few years in the garage laboratory. You can hear the lineage: rubber-band Beatles melodies, Beach Boys air in the harmonies, a flash of Nirvana fuzz when a chorus needs teeth, Switchfoot’s big-sky uplift, Valley’s modern elasticity.
Then 2023 arrived, and they went all in. “Flower Stress in Blue” seeped across TikTok and Instagram, growing their monthly Spotify listeners from 13,000 to 1.4 million today.
“We didn’t pay for ads, and we didn’t boost posts. It was just social media,” Angelo says. “It’s crazy how one song connecting can change the game.”
What changed wasn’t just their following. It was who gets to call the shots.
“It’s so cool because people have wanted to do this for a long time,” Angelo says. “But they couldn’t, because the industry only played certain kinds of songs. If you didn’t fit the mold, you weren’t getting played, which meant you weren’t making a living. Now, you don’t need the gatekeepers anymore.”
Their dad, who still produces, gave them the rule you can hear in the writing.
“He told us, ‘Loving Jesus and loving music isn’t enough. You need a vision,’” Angelo says. “‘Because if you don’t, the numbers will push you all over the place. Write it down. Know your why. That’s what will sustain you.’”
Strings and Heart’s why has a full shape now. Their album Secret Place is full of faith-filled, bright-guitar songs for people who don’t want to be preached at.
The title comes from a communion moment that exposed how plastic their routines had become.
“People are looking for authenticity, whether you follow Jesus or not,” Angelo said. “It’s what our generation craves.”
That’s why the band openly wrestles with faith and doubt, friendship and grief — topics you wouldn’t normally expect from a surf rock band.
“We get people saying, ‘I don’t follow Jesus, but I love this,’” he says. “That means something’s connecting.”
Connection is key for the brothers. While many artists would be seeking a major label’s support, the freedom of being unattached to rules and regulations has lead to not only a freedom in their music but also a unique ability to connect to their fans, whether it’s through social media or in person on tour.
“We can do whatever we want. We don’t have a label saying, ‘You have to sound like this,’” Angelo says. “It’s freeing.”
That’s why they’re independent by choice.
“We’re not knocking on doors,” Angelo says. “If something fits, great. But we’re not changing who we are,” Angelo says. “We just want to be authentic. Whether it’s one person listening or a million, that’s the only thing that matters.”
Sarah Juers
Where Strings and Heart chase sky, Sarah Juers builds rooms. Her tracks feel like collage—soul and R&B smolder under indie-folk textures, gospel color threads the harmonies, and a line will suddenly land like a poem you dog-eared.
Her voice can hush or flare, but it always sounds close, like she’s telling you a secret and daring you to write it down.
“I’m in my fearless era,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think I’m actually fearless. It’s more like Jesus got right in my face and says, ‘Chill. Let’s do something different.’ Once He said that, I was like, all right, cool.”
Juers began posting songs to SoundCloud in 2014, orbiting the Christian rap world with friends like Jon Keith and Dale. She never rapped—and she never will, she clarifies—but she learned collaboration as a language. That’s why her songs snap into place even when the ingredients look unlikely.
“It’s funny — I’m most connected with Christian rappers even though I’m not one,” she says. “I don’t even know how it happened. But they’re my people. Musically, we’re so different, but relationally, they’re my community.”
Her influences are a moodboard she refuses to clean up.
“I just make music,” she says. “I love soul, I love gospel, I love Bon Iver, I love hip hop. It all fuses together. I don’t limit myself to a genre, because my music doesn’t either.”
She writes like a painter trying to put color on the air. “I love poetry,” she says. “Using words to make something invisible visible in your mind—that’s insane to me. That’s what I want my songs to do.”
For years, her subject matter came from the funny-sad middle—unrequited crushes that turned into imaginary exes, faith that wobbled then steadied.
“I’ve never had a boyfriend. But in my head? I’ve had plenty,” she jokes. “My former lovers don’t know they were my former lovers. But trust me—we were vibing.”
Lately she’s flipped the lens, writing from biblical perspectives and modernizing voices you think you already know. Mary. David. People who loved and lost and wrote. It makes Scripture feel like pop poetry without sanding off the sacred.
“It’s been fun to imagine what they’d sound like now,” she says. “They were human too. They had the same experiences we have.”
If you haven’t heard her music yet, imagine H.E.R. and Bon Iver in the same room, then let gospel harmonies leak under the door. Or skip the metaphors and just press play — the lyrics will do the rest.
Juers’ career is entering a new season now that she’s taken the step to move to NYC and pursue music full-time. Which is a huge risk.
“My biggest fear was, what if I do this full-time and it takes the joy away?” she says. “But when God said, ‘This is what I have for you,’ I had peace. Now I know it’s going to happen however it happens. I don’t have to control it.”
Once she said yes, doors started opening.
“It’s wild,” she says. “Ten years of doing this, and then the second I said yes, everything started happening.
“I just decided, I’m going to focus on what I want to do, and I had so much peace,” she says. “Even though it’s unknown, even though I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m not worried anymore. It’s going to happen.”
“This is it,” she says. “It feels like the start of something, and I’m excited.”
Gracie Binion
Gracie Binion sings like thunder on a clear day—raspy and bright at once, a tone that can crack a ceiling without turning mean.
The tracks around her tilt alt-rock, then glint with worship language that refuses to be merchandised. She writes like someone who loves God too much to lie to Him and loves art too much to water it down.
She grew up in the current: a songwriter dad, a singer mom and a life of church stages. By age 11 she was already taking meetings.
“I wanted to be a singer from the start,” she says. “I annoyed my family constantly, just making up songs and performing all the time. My brothers weren’t like that at all, but I loved being the center of attention.”
By age 15 she had a label development deal under the moniker MDSN — her first name Madison without the vowels, a branding gambit that looked better on paper than in the wild.
“I thought it was the coolest thing at 16,” she says. “But no one ever got it. I probably confused more people than I helped.”
At 18 she signed a 3-year label deal. But by 21 she was independent again — wiser, and allergic to the idea of profiting from what should be sacrifice.
“I started developing this disdain for the idea of selling worship,” she says. “It just felt wrong to be making a money off of something that was supposed to be a sacrifice. I’ve seen people I grew up around lose their faith but stay in the industry, and I never wanted to end up there. I still wrestle with that tension daily.”
What freed her was a bigger definition.
“My whole life is worship,” she says. “The art I create is worship. The music I write, I write with God. Even if the songs don’t sound like something you’d sing in church, they’re still worship because of where they come from—my heart.”
Her debut album under her own name, I Miss You, sounds like that conviction — guitar edge, poetic blade, arrangements that breathe like a live room.
“I fought for that album,” she says. “I didn’t love the first EP I put out as MDSN, and I wasn’t going to go through all that again just to release something I wasn’t proud of. I knew what I wanted it to sound like, and I wasn’t going to let anyone talk me out of it.”
Elevation Rhythm producer Josh Holliday was up for the task.
“I’d give him the weirdest directions — like, ‘I want this song to feel like you’re standing in a garden with the wind pushing your hair back and wind chimes around you,’” she says. “And he’d just say, ‘Got it,’ and nail it.”
A standout track, “Hidden in Obscurity,” threads melody through a poem her grandmother copied into her Bible before she passed. When listeners misread a line as suggestive, she didn’t blink. The lyric stayed.
“It was a direct quote from the poem,” she says. “If people want to misinterpret it, that’s on them, not me. I wasn’t changing it.”
That steel comes from rooms where she was told to soften. “It was like they didn’t trust me to know what I wanted,” she says. “After a while you start to believe them, and that’s dangerous. It takes a very strong personality as a woman to push through and actually create the music you want to create.”
Rita Springer and Stephanie Gretzinger became lodestars.
“Rita is like everyone’s mom. She’s blunt, and I need that,” she says. “And Stephanie—I look at her relationship with God and I want whatever she has. If she told me to shave my head because the Lord said so, I’d probably do it. That’s seriously how much I trust her walk with Him.”
Home for Binion is Chattanooga now. Her husband serves at a small church. She calls it necessary hiddenness—a quiet that lets her songs grow up.
“It’s not about building a platform here. It’s just about serving God and being in a healthy, steady environment,” she says.
Her plans: another artist record, a live worship EP and maybe a mainstream album someday. Her rules: don’t sell what you can’t stand behind.
“I never want to put out expensive merch for a worship song,” she says. “If I release a worship record, I want people to be able to access it freely. It has to be pure.”
At 25, she knows what she won’t do as clearly as what she will. “I just want to create with God,” she says. “That’s the
whole point.”
Jay Manwell
The first thing you hear in a Jay Manwell track is the blend—smooth R&B hooks layered over hip-hop grit, with flashes of guitar and live drums that nod back to their punk-band roots. The vocals glide, but the edges stay raw. It’s music that can fill a car stereo on a summer night and still hit like a prayer whispered under your breath.
“We want to make songs that people actually feel,” Jay says. “Something you can play in any setting, but it still points you back to God.”
His brother Manwell jumps in.
“There’s a responsibility that comes with influence,” he says. “We’ve seen how much of an impact our music has on young people. So we’ve got to be intentional about every move we make.”
That mix of polish and conviction has quietly turned the brothers into one of the most compelling new acts in Christian hip-hop and R&B. Performing simply as Jay Manwell, they’ve been winning fans with sharp visuals, a clear message and music that refuses to stay in one lane. Their breakout song “All the Ways” showed just how wide their reach could be.
“We had people messaging us saying, ‘I don’t believe in God, but this song got me through a hard time,’” Jay says. “That’s the kind of impact we want.”
Onstage, their versatility sets them apart. A set might include smooth R&B harmonies over programmed beats, then suddenly Jay slings on a guitar or Manwell slides behind the drums. The punk band DNA is still in their system, and they lean into it.
“Sometimes people don’t expect it,” Manwell says. “But that’s part of what makes it fun. It’s just who we are.”
They’ve already begun playing festivals, including this summer’s Siervos Festival in Houston, which has hosted artists like Lecrae and Andy Mineo. Leading up to it, they’re releasing a new single every month, building toward an eventual EP.
“We’d love to do a full album eventually,” Jay says. “But right now, this pace works. It gives us space to keep growing.”
The growth didn’t happen overnight. For years in Abilene, Texas, the brothers balanced worship leading with side hustles and odd jobs, writing music when they could. They first performed under the name Lundi—a stylized version of their last name—but eventually realized it didn’t fit.
“It was just cleaner,” Manwell says. “It felt more like us.”
Their musical upbringing was eclectic. Their mom’s playlists jumped from Kirk Franklin to Relient K to Michael Jackson, and the brothers absorbed it all. Before they ever touched a hip-hop track, they were bashing out riffs in their Christian punk band, Red Moon.
“We didn’t realize it at the time, but that season taught us everything about how to build something from scratch,” Jay says.
That DIY ethic carried into Jay Manwell. Their parents stepped in as managers, learning the business alongside them. Labels showed interest, but the brothers stayed independent.
“A couple of offers came in, but we knew what we wanted,” Jay says. “We don’t want to compromise the message.”
That message — faithful, intentional and unwavering — has guided every decision, even when it meant turning down collaborations that could have boosted exposure.
“We’re not just trying to build a platform,” Jay says. “We’re trying to build relationships. This is our ministry.”
Social media has been a key part of their rise, but it hasn’t come without criticism.
“People say wild stuff in the comments,” Manwell says. “You have to know who you are in Christ. That’s the only way to keep going.”
After five years of slow, steady momentum, Jay Manwell is beginning to see the reward of consistency. The brothers have carved out a lane by refusing to blend in. They’re still in Abilene, still building one song and one show at a time, still saying yes when the door opens and no when it doesn’t fit.
“If God gives you something to steward, you don’t quit on it when it gets hard,” Manwell says. “You just keep showing up.”
For Jay Manwell, that’s the plan. One track, one stage, one conversation at a time.
What ties these five together isn’t a format. It’s instinct. Allison Eide writes confessional pop that sits with you at 2 a.m. Strings & Heart turn indie rock into a bright-guitar altar for honesty. Sarah Juers collages soul, R&B and folk into rooms you want to live in. Gracie Binion drags worship into the wild with rock edges and a voice that can crack a ceiling. Jay Manwell fuses sleek R&B and hip-hop with punk-band energy, delivering songs that sound like Saturday night and Sunday morning at once.
They’ve stopped asking permission from a system built to favor what’s safe. They’re writing for people in the middle, not products at the end. Call it Christian indie or worship-adjacent or something else. It doesn’t need a tag to be true.
What matters is that it’s happening. And for once, it feels less like a trend and more like an industry reset.
