BEABADOOBEE - Pylon

We last left off with Beatrice Laus two years ago, when “This Is How Tomorrow Moves” reached number one on the UK charts, opening the door for the Anglo-Filipino singer to the upper reaches of the bills at major music festivals. It was the right record to add new facets to the already varied repertoire of a still very young artist. Two years on, Bea – now twenty-six – has decided to steer back toward guitar-driven territory, picking up the thread laid down on her debut, but pushing it to a much higher level. After all, at a time when guitars seem to be back in fashion within pop (see the recent work of Charli XCX and Slayyyter), why should the artist who's always wielded them neglect them now?

But "Pylon" isn't just a record of electric guitars, sitting at the exact crossroads of indie-rock and alt-pop: it's also an album full of guests, skilfully woven into a project expertly put together by the members of her band, Jason Vance Harris (guitarist) and Luca Caruso (drummer, of clear Italian descent). Brendan Yates (Turnstile), Chino Moreno (Deftones), Hayley Williams (Paramore), Evan Stephens Hall (Pinegrove), Andrew Fisher (Basement), Shane Moran (Title Fight, co-writer on eight tracks), Matty Healy and George Daniel (The 1975, both co-producers of "Write Me A Letter") add plenty of intrigue to this collection of fine songs, genuinely interesting even for those who feel at a distance from Beabadoobee's usual mood.

Four tracks in particular hit hard from the very first listen, strongly defining the character of the whole project. First there's "Sun Has Set", which, placed right after the opening title track – and chosen as the lead single as well as the opener for the early dates of the promotional tour – immediately establishes the project's so-nineties approach, embodying its most aggressive facet. The second half of the tracklist, meanwhile, is where the round, indie-pop perfection of "Radio" is concentrated, built on sounds that recall the slacker attitude of Pavement and Courtney Barnett, alongside the soft atmospheres of "Powerlines" (the duet with Brendan Yates), always on the verge of catching fire, and the closer entrusted to the superb "Satellite", the most demanding track to pull off, with a chorus that recalls both the crossover sound of Deftones (fittingly, it's shared with Chino Moreno) and certain enveloping nu-gaze textures.

It's a shame the rest of the journey doesn't reach the same heights as these four standouts, otherwise Beabadoobee would certainly have delivered an absolute masterpiece. As it stands, "Pylon" is probably not yet her definitive record (she still has plenty of time to make that one...), but rather an intermediate step in completing her stylistic prism. Still, she moves well through the other ten tracks too, proving more convincing in the largely acoustic moments (the sweet one-two of "Spark"/"Despite That", always artfully "dirtied" with electricity, disrupted by saturation that channels the more experimental side of Bea and her backing band) than when she chases the radio hit ("Memories"), also squandering the opportunity offered by the duet with Hayley Williams on the forgettable "Nothing To Prove". Duets that will no doubt materialize on the stages of the major music festivals next summer.

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24/09/2026