When beabadoobee announced Pylon earlier this year, she got a lot of attention for its guest lineup — including Hayley Williams, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, and members of the 1975. However, that was only part of the blueprint as she unveiled a sharper, heavier sound, teased upon mailing out iPod Shuffles loaded with the lead single “Sun Has Set.” Written largely on the road, the English pop singer-songwriter’s latest turns anger, isolation, and being homesick into a live-minded statement of intent, built for people who found Deftones on MTV in the ’90s and those just discovering them on TikTok. It’s intriguing, genuine, and from the heart, but also not a total surprise for someone who spent their teenage years obsessed with the Cure. As she told AP of her wide palette, “I get bored easily.”
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It’s not a concept album but an ode to the road
When beabadoobee toured This Is How Tomorrow Moves in 2024, she watched electricity towers, aka pylons, fly by through her bus windows, trying to stay off social media. They turned into an unlikely source of hope when she felt isolated from her loved ones, so much so that the experience sparked the follow-up’s name and cover art. “I didn’t want it to feel like a conceptual album,” she told Vogue Australia. “I just got obsessed with these things, to the point that I just saw it as some weird connection to being home.” That search for connection is, in a lot of ways, Pylon’s guts, from the glowing list of collaborators to reconnecting with her 19-year-old self. —Neville Hardman
Growing up never really ends
After the confidence of This Is How Tomorrow Moves, beabadoobee confronted uncertainty again. Adulthood, she realizes, isn’t something you can simply master. Pylon suggests that moving forward isn’t about having everything figured out or leaving your past behind — it’s about accepting that growing up means making mistakes, feeling insecure, and learning that life is ambiguous. As she sings on “Switchblade,” “Growing up just means to fuck everything up again.” —Kelsey Barnes
Leaning into heavier sounds gives those emotions weight
The biggest musical shift on Pylon is how much heavier and more abrasive beabadoobee sounds without losing her knack for melody. “I have always loved hardcore and Midwest emo, and I wanted to make my own version of that,” she told Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1. As such, Pylon pushes much further into grunge, alt-rock, and ’90s guitar music. Feedback and jagged riffs, like on “Radio” and “Switchblade,” make the anger, loneliness, and frustration in the songwriting feel immediate. —Kelsey Barnes
The collaborations trace her alternative DNA
Pylon is a melting pot of beabadoobee’s influences — with features from Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, plus co-writes with Title Fight’s Shane Moran and Evan Stephens Hall from Pinegrove, a band she loves so much she got a marigold flower tattoo behind her ear. The album also has backing vocals from Deftones’ Chino Moreno and production from the 1975’s George Daniel and Matty Healy. Each collaboration connects to a different part of her musical history without ever overshadowing her. More than anything, they make the album feel like a map of the sounds that have shaped her. —Kelsey Barnes
Her vocal range jumps
bea’s made a career out of whispery pop, but her best songs are the ones where she lets it rip. “Sun Has Set” is raging and scorned, sounding light-years from the gentle voice that opened the album. “When I say we’ll never be friends/I mean, we’ll never pretend/Fuck that, you can never run back to me now,” she spits. Likewise, the chorus of “Satellite,” featuring Moreno on the second go, bursts into a mushroom cloud, running against torrents of grimy fuzz. “There’s a beauty in imperfection,” bea said in another interview. “I used to be scared, thinking, ‘Oh, my God, do I sound good in this song?’ But I’m playing with a live band… I’m going to live in this moment and live through the song. I have no choice but to.” —Neville Hardman
