On October 8th, Beabadoobee’s Powerlines tour at Place Bell floored me. As someone who fell in love with her music in middle school, I felt nostalgia wash over me upon hearing songs I listened to at 13 live. What stunned me most was witnessing the intense musical transformation she went through in real time. She opened her set with Pylon’s lead single Sun Has Set, marking a clear musical shift to a grittier sound. While she isn’t entirely abandoning the slower songs, her newest album, Pylon offers a new side of Beabadoobee for listeners. She did play soft, calm songs like an acoustic rendition of the way things go and the unreleased track Lemon to My Lime, but she primarily stuck to the harsh sound heard throughout the entirety of Pylon. The most ‘rock’ moment of her concert was during Powerlines when she climbed onto the pylon structure built on the stage and performed the entire song. The crowd was thunderous and enthusiastic and they knew the album well, which awed me, since it had come out less than a month ago.
Beabadoobee, also known as Beatrice Laus, first stood out to early fans as a soothing, dreamy bedroom pop artist. Her big break came after Canadian rapper Powfu remixed Coffee, producing the TikTok hit Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head), early in the quarantine era. As the song blew up online, Laus rode the fame wave and released her first studio album, Fake It Flowers. Her most recent album, Pylon, released in September, debuted at number one in the United Kingdom, making it her second number one record after This Is How Tomorrow Moves in 2024.
Despite her major musical success, Beabadoobee’s sound has changed dramatically since her lo-fi bedroom pop days. The transition from I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus, a track off her 2019 EP Space Cadet, to Sun Has Set is enough to give a listener whiplash. While Laus has toyed around with an edgier sound in past EPs and albums, Pylon embraces these styles like never before. While an album like Fake It Flowers takes bits and pieces of 90s rock and meshes them with Beabadoobee’s peaceful vocals, Pylon is raw and rugged. She articulates the reason behind this musical change in a 2022 GQ interview before the release of her album Beatopia, where she says, “I felt like I had to stick to this genre of, like, pop, rock, and 90s alternative grunge because Coffee was going viral.” Laus further explained that she felt chained down by her previous releases because her style has changed drastically since she was releasing music on YouTube at 17. This pressure to conform to her original sound seemed to box her into something she wasn’t entirely happy with musically.
Pylon preserves pieces of the ‘old’ Beabadoobee sound, meshing her gentle vocals with a new layer of grittier instrumentals and features from alternative icons such as Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates. She was heavily inspired by the music that she listens to, specifically Midwest emo. Laus expands on this theme in an interview with ELLE Magazine, “I made an emo riff. Every time I played it to my friends, they were like, this is the music you listen to. I think in a weird way, I feel the most myself I’ve ever felt.” She then delves deep into her struggles in her relationship, her search for herself, and the transition from her teens to her twenties.
Beabadoobee has been working on new music, releasing songs, touring, and repeating that cycle since getting picked up by Dirty Hit Records in April 2018. This lifestyle leaves little room for true self-exploration. She confided in Highsnobiety that the Pylon tour “will be like the only and last tour that I’ll play venues of that size,” as she has no dreams of ‘making it big’ as a major pop star.
This album marks a clear shift for Laus, but not a negative one. Growing up at the same pace as an artist you love is such a special experience, and one I am grateful to go through in real time. I will always have a soft spot for her calmer songs, mostly due to the memories tied to them, but I treasure hearing her music evolve at the same pace as my taste does. Finding yourself from teendom to young adulthood is certainly no easy feat, especially under the spotlight. Such a raw and authentic album is comforting to listen to especially as I experience the same feelings of reflection and exploration. Seeing a person I admired at a young age also dealing with the growing pains of adolescence reminds me that the journey to self-discovery is universal. The Powerlines tour could not have come at a better time for me. The move from my hometown to Montréal two months ago has been daunting, but Pylon’s significance in Beabadoobee’s life reminds me that if she can figure it all out, so can I. Watching Laus change her musical style so intensely reminds me that I, too, can climb onto that Pylon and make what I want of myself. Although her earlier music will always hold a special place in my heart, Pylon marks a necessary period of change for Laus, and hopefully the same for all of us listening in on her life.
