{"id":618031,"date":"2026-09-16T17:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T17:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/618031\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T17:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T17:00:09","slug":"review-beabadoobee-is-in-a-fighting-mood-on-the-excellent-pylon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/618031\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Beabadoobee Is in a Fighting Mood on the Excellent ‘Pylon’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPylon is Beatrice Laus\u2019 fourth album, after growing up in public as Beabadoobee<\/a>, going from the teenage bedroom-pop whiz kid du jour to bona fide rock star. But she\u2019s at her nastiest here, with a fresh sound full of raw guitar aggression, which fits how she\u2019s feeling in these righteously pissed-off tunes. At 26, Beabadoobee\u2019s taking stock of the emotional wreckage of her twenties \u2014 as in \u201cWrite Me a Letter,\u201d where she sighs, \u201cYou\u2019re older\/I\u2019m bipolar\/The weather\u2019s getting colder.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAll 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 \u201cCoffee.\u201d Yet she was no novelty, as she proved in homemade gems like \u201cShe Plays Bass\u201d and her Pavement fan letter \u201cI Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut she grows up with a bang on Pylon. She\u2019s never conjured up so much guitar rage, and it suits her, since she\u2019s in a fighting mood. She sets the tone with the bruising single \u201cSun Has Set,\u201d snarling in her deceptively sweet voice, \u201cWhen I say we\u2019ll never be friends\/I mean we\u2019ll never pretend\/Fuck that, you can never run back to me now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tHer last album, 2024\u2019s This Is How Tomorrow Moves<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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 \u201cWrite Me a Lettter,\u201d \u201cRadio,\u201d and \u201cSwitchblade,\u201d where she laments, \u201cGrowing up just means to fuck everything up again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s always had a jones for Nineties rock, an era when the radio was ruled by rude female voices and loud guitars \u2014 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 \u201cSatellite.\u201d (The first song she ever learned to play on guitar was Sixpence None the Richer\u2019s \u201cKiss Me,\u201d which makes sense.)<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tLaus 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 \u201cNothing to Prove.\u201d Williams helps her taunt her ex (\u201cYou want it, I got it, I flaunt it, you need it\u201d) with a playground nyah-nyah chant. \u201cPowerlines\u201d is a duet with Brendan Yates of Turnstile, with two long-distance lovers craving each other across the miles \u2014 as she sings, \u201cI\u2019m talking nonsense and it\u2019s 4 a.m.\/So are you awake?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe also gets contributions from the Deftones\u2019 Chino Moreno, Pinegrove\u2019s Evan Stephens Hall, Title Fight\u2019s Shane Moran, and Basement\u2019s Andrew Fisher, as well as her longtime mentors from the 1975, Matty Healy and George Daniel. She races from one emotional extreme to another \u2014 love, hate, insecurity, on-the-road loneliness, more hate, all caught up in the feedback-friendly sizzle of the guitars.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cRadio,\u201d you\u2019ve burned her for the last time, to the point where she\u2019s not even going to bother telling you off \u2014 she\u2019ll just turn her pain into music, so \u201cyou\u2019ll listen to this song on the radio.\u201d On the other end of the emotional spectrum, \u201cIt\u2019s Alright\u201d is her most openhearted romance. \u201cTake the wheel,\u201d she sighs over J. Mascis-style guitar. \u201cDrive me out to somewhere I\u2019ve never seen\/Kiss me like someone you\u2019ve never been with.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBeabadoobee doesn\u2019t figure out any solutions to her problems in these songs \u2014 that wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s got plenty of time to come up with answers \u2014 but for now, she just wants to pump all her doubts and fears into guitar noise. And Pylon makes it sound like she\u2019s just getting started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pylon is Beatrice Laus\u2019 fourth album, after growing up in public as Beabadoobee, going from the teenage bedroom-pop…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[279518,146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-618031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-beabadoobee","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}