Beabadoobee Swerves Back to Alt-Rock Fury on 'Pylon' — SkimNews
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- Beabadoobee (Beatrice Laus), the 26-year-old British-Filipino singer-songwriter, releases her fourth album "Pylon," featuring guests including Hayley Williams (Paramore), Chino Moreno (Deftones), Matty Healy, George Daniel (the 1975) and Brendan Yates (Turnstile)
- "Pylon" reverses the pop-friendly direction of her 2024 Rick Rubin-produced "This Is How Tomorrow Moves" — recorded after her Taylor Swift Eras tour support slot — and returns to the 90s alt-rock, grunge and shoegaze of her earlier work, with caustic distortion and jagged riffs
- Beabadoobee's commercial scale is already significant: her 2020 collaboration with Powfu, "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)," has been streamed over 2 billion times, and her upcoming UK tour is booked exclusively into arenas including the O2 and Madison Square Garden
- The album repeatedly deploys a "sweet-to-sour pivot" — dreamy bedroom-pop passages shattered by sulphurous fuzz — though the reviewer judges the closing track "Estranged" to get the balance wrong
- Lyrics tackle classic rock-star concerns (tour dislocation on the title track, fake friends on the Williams duet "Nothing to Prove") but translate them into terms her primarily female, late-teen-to-early-20s fanbase recognises, from the early-adulthood confusion of "Switchblade" to a brutal frenemy takedown on "Sun Has Set"
- The closing track "Satellite" addresses her icon status head-on: "I give the generation a new infatuation / If only I knew how to cope with the times," reflecting the social-media phenomenon of fans imitating her freckles and makeup since 2021
Why it matters: Beabadoobee is a 2bn-stream, arena-headlining artist with a devoted primarily Gen-Z female fanbase — yet, as the review notes, most people outside that cohort would struggle to name a single song of hers. "Pylon" tests whether she can pull that audience back toward guitar-heavy territory after a deliberately pop-leaning predecessor.
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