Pylon is Beatrice Laus’ fourth album, after growing up in public as Beabadoobee, going from the teenage bedroom-pop whiz kid du jour to bona fide rock star. But she’s at her nastiest here, with a fresh sound full of raw guitar aggression, which fits how
she’s feeling in these righteously pissed-off tunes. At 27, Beabadoobee’s taking stock of the emotional wreckage of her twenties — as in “Write Me a Letter,” where she sighs, “You’re older/I’m bipolar/The weather’s getting colder.”
All over Pylon, she comes on like the grown-up version of the clever teen misfit she played on early records like Space Cadet, full of indie-rock sass. She was just 17 when she blew up worldwide, going viral with “Coffee.” Yet she was no novelty, as she proved in homemade gems like “She Plays Bass” and her Pavement fan letter “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus.”
But she grows up with a bang on Pylon. She’s never conjured up so much guitar rage, and it suits her, since she’s in a fighting mood. She sets the tone with the bruising single “Sun Has Set,” snarling in her deceptively sweet voice, “When I say we’ll never be friends/I mean we’ll never pretend/Fuck that, you can never run back to me now.”
Her last album, 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves, was laid-back and whimsical, striving for maturity with producer Rick Rubin, but in a way that hinted she was mellowing out before her time. But fortunately, she gets meaner on Pylon. You can definitely hear how deep she’s been listening to legendary indie guitar bands like Sonic Youth, Helium, and Dinosaur Jr., with her feedback blazing away. Her songwriting is sharper than ever in emotionally charged tunes like “Write Me a Lettter,” “Radio,” and “Switchblade,” where she laments, “Growing up just means to fuck everything up again.”
She’s always had a jones for Nineties rock, an era when the radio was ruled by rude female voices and loud guitars — just her kind of combo. But she really takes her Nineties obsessions to the bank on Pylon, mixing up grunge thunder and pop melody, Midwest emo melancholy and bratty mall-punk, with a touch of Lilith Fair in ballads like “Satellite.” (The first song she ever learned to play on guitar was Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me,” which makes sense.)
Laus gets a boost from some of her high-profile admirers, like Hayley Williams of Paramore, who sounds right at home singing on the unrepentant kiss-off “Nothing to Prove.” Williams helps her taunt her ex (“You want it, I got it, I flaunt it, you need it”) with a playground nyah-nyah chant. “Powerlines” is a duet with Brendan Yates of Turnstile, with two long-distance lovers craving each other across the miles — as she sings, “I’m talking nonsense and it’s 4 a.m./So are you awake?”
She also gets contributions from the Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Title Fight’s Shane Moran, and Basement’s Andrew Fisher, as well as her longtime mentors from the 1975, Matty Healy and George Daniel. She races from one emotional extreme to another — love, hate, insecurity, on-the-road loneliness, more hate, all caught up in the feedback-friendly sizzle of the guitars.
In “Radio,” you’ve burned her for the last time, to the point where she’s not even going to bother telling you off — she’ll just turn her pain into music, so “you’ll listen to this song on the radio.” On the other end of the emotional spectrum, “It’s Alright” is her most open-hearted romance. “Take the wheel,” she sighs over J. Mascis-style guitar. “Drive me out to somewhere I’ve never seen/Kiss me like someone you’ve never been with.”
Beabadoobee doesn’t figure out any solutions to her problems in these songs — that wouldn’t be very Nineties of her, would it? But even at her most confused, she still bristles with confidence, which gives the album such a distinctive rock kick. She’s got plenty of time to come up with answers — but for now, she just wants to pump all her doubts and fears into guitar noise. And Pylon makes it sound like she’s just getting started.
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