beabadoobee

United Kingdom

Bio

There’s comfort in the fact that some things don’t change, and there’s a bit of horror, too. Pylon, the stark and striking fourth album by Beabadoobee, is named for the electricity towers that dot every major artery in the world—the strong, spindly structures that reminded Bea Laus, the creative mind behind Beabadoobee, of her connection to friends and family at home while she was staring down extreme disconnection and isolation on tour over the past few years. Or maybe you could read the title as an allusion to Laus’ spiky, forceful new sound—the waves of distortion that crash and shatter across this record’s 14 songs mirroring the intense crackle you hear when walking under power lines. The pylon is also a fitting symbol for an album that reckons with the repetitive anxieties of your mid-twenties: What if I’m always going to be this way? What if life is just pylon after pylon on the road?

Pylon took shape in the years following the release of 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves. That album chronicled what felt like a transformative period of Laus’ life, during which she shook off hangups from her adolescence and stepped into womanhood with confidence and aplomb. But, writing between tour and on the road, away from friends and loved ones, she began to feel new vulnerabilities and anxieties creep into her life. Like so many twentysomethings before her, the certitude of her early twenties gave way to a chasm of confusion and indecision. “My last record, I had this sureness—like, hey, this is what it means to be a woman, this is what it means to be a grown up. But it felt like it kind of crashed before my eyes,” Laus reflects. “It was like, holy shit—not everything is a nice beach!”

All that new uncertainty resulted in an album that’s more rangy and complex than anything that Beabadoobee has ever put out—a tannic rock record that is, at various points, angry, lonesome, ecstatic, depressed and deeply, pathologically in love. Its vast array of feelings, often contradictory ones, is the point, says Laus: “Pylon is about accepting that negative feelings are going to come back—accepting the insecurity and feeling confused,” she says. “It’s all a necessary part of growing and knowing yourself better. You have to go through all that shit, I have to write about it, or else I’m just gonna think I’m a grownup every birthday, which I’m not.”

Ever a devotee of pure rock music—both as something to be cherished and something to be played with—Laus casts these feelings in songs that touch on classic grunge, midwest emo and ‘90s radio rock, zeroing in on a sound that is both harsher and more direct than any of her previous records. She says the music she’s loved has “always been an influence” on her music, and so for B4 she went straight to the source. A fair few of Beabadoobee’s composite influences contributed to Pylon, a fact that speaks to the goodwill and respect Laus has amassed over the course of her relatively brief career.

Hayley Williams sings on “Nothing to Prove,” a deeply anthemic indie-rock song about, Laus says, “getting your power back” from fairweather friends who just want a bit of your success. The moody “Powerlines” features a verse from Turnstile singer Brendan Yates, a master of matching vocal force with emotional nuance. Elsewhere, you’ll find a few lyrics co-written by Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall—“What the actual fuck? The guy I have tattooed behind my ear?”—as well as backing vocals from Deftones’ Chino Moreno, guitar and writing contributions from Title Fight legend Shane Moran, and, on “Write Me A Letter”, production work from Laus’ longtime friends and mentors Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975. Laus describes these collaborations as “a huge achievement,” which undersells it some—if anything, they’re proof of the fact that, at this point in her career, Laus is a peer to many of these musicians, a beloved songwriter who has progressed in leaps and bounds since she first debuted in 2018. It’s not surprising, in other words, that these people would jump at the chance to work with Laus—although that fact doesn’t temper her excitement. “If no one likes this record, I love it—the fact that my heroes wanted to be on this album is insane,” she says. “It’s a sweet ending to all the meaning behind the music.”

That is, ultimately, a driving force on Pylon—the idea that sometimes you have to make your own happiness. That’s reflected in lead single “Sun Has Set,” a quintessentially Beabadoobee heater that marries a ginormous earworm hook with snarling, confrontational attitude. It’s unlike past Beabadoobee dressings-down in that it’s righteously, ecstatically angry: “When I say we’ll never be friends/I mean we’ll never pretend/Fuck that, you can never run back to me now,” sings Laus. “Sun Has Set” introduces Pylon as, in essence, a set of songs that began as diary entries, words that Laus thought she’d never be able to say out loud. “A lot of the songs on this record are things I wish I could have said to someone,” she says. “This song has this petty tunnel vision—it’s like, I hate you. You’re gonna stay here and listen to how much I hate you. Because I never got to say that.”

That song represents one side of Pylon: The right to say exactly what you feel, even when you’re seeing red. But more often, Laus is writing complex songs that put her own subjectivity in the firing line. “Write Me A Letter,” a thrumming indie-pop track that builds to churning pop-punk, is about “seeing my fault in situations, but also admitting things that I would be too embarrassed to say out loud.” The track’s righteously intense production, of course, is enough to wipe away that embarrassment, revealing only hard truths in its wake. Laus might not have written “Write Me A Letter” before this record; it’s the kind of song she needed, not wanted, to get out. “I had to write these songs on tour or between tours because I had to understand what was going on in my head,” she says. “It’s this idea of letting go and accepting change. When I was on tour, I was yearning for something, and it made me think: How do I make myself feel comfortable? What does it mean to grow up? I was just missing how things were.”

And make no mistake, nostalgia is often a curse on Pylon: On “Memories,” which Laus describes as “one of the happiest songs on the album,” she falls deep into a spiral of romanticizing bygone moments, “clinging onto ideas that should make me happy but actually make me feel sad, because I wish they were just moments I lived in forever.” These songs are raw and sometimes uncomfortably real, recalling the Laus who poured her life into songs as a teenager for the world to hear. She says it’s the result of writing alone in hotel rooms, which “reminded me a lot of how I wrote songs at 17, alone in my bedroom, feeling sad as fuck.”

Of course, there is a marked new sophistication to these songs: On the oblique, gorgeous “Spark,” a co-write with Hall, she says goodbye to “the obnoxious dark,” a simple but brilliantly poetic image; “Switchblade” takes its central metaphor and pulls it apart thoroughly, wondering whether “self-defence is to be brave/Do you start the fight/Or take the flight?” These songs have no clear answers, and that’s the point—Laus is, emphatically, past the time in which she thought she could ever have everything figured out. Pylon, for all its turbulent emotions, kind of celebrates that not knowing; its brilliance suggests that sitting with uncertainty can create something immense. That sweet-and-sour is built into Pylon, captured on the lyrics to the title track. “Like a pylon on an open road, it’s like, you’d never see an open road without a pylon,” explains Laus. “And you’d never see me without the person I truly love.”