Beabadoobee's Pylon swaps pop for grunge-heavy rock — SkimNews
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- Beabadoobee (Beatrice Laus) releases her fourth album Pylon, featuring guests including Hayley Williams of Paramore, Chino Moreno of Deftones, Matty Healy, George Daniel of the 1975, and Brendan Yates of Turnstile.
- The album marks a pivot away from the pop leanings of her 2024 Rick Rubin-produced record This Is How Tomorrow Moves, toward distortion-drenched guitars and grunge textures — a shift the review dates to her support slot on Taylor Swift's Eras tour.
- Her biggest hit, "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)" with Canadian rapper Powfu, has been streamed more than 2 billion times, and her previous album debuted at No 1 on the UK charts.
- Her UK tour is housed exclusively in arenas including the O2 and Madison Square Garden, yet the reviewer argues most people outside her core fanbase — primarily women in their late teens and early 20s — likely couldn't name a song by her.
- Lyrically, Pylon tackles familiar rock-star themes like touring dislocation and fake friends, but frames them in terms her young audience can relate to — "Hold me like a screen, disconnected from reality" on the title track, and "growing up just means to fuck everything up again" on Switchblade.
Why it matters: Pylon argues Beabadoobee's arena-filling success — 2 billion streams on "Death Bed," a UK No 1 album, an all-arena tour — deserves broader recognition than her niche fanbase commands. The pivot from her pop-leaning Eras-tour-era sound toward grunge textures is a deliberate test of whether her devoted young female fanbase can translate into wider rock credibility.
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