REVIEW: beabadoobee Keeps Moving Forward on ‘Pylon’
REVIEW
REVIEW
☆ BY SHEVON GREENE ☆
Photo by Erika Kamano
BEABADOOBEE’S NEW ALBUM PYLON FEELS FULL-CIRCLE—if you’re familiar with her musical career so far. She wrote these tracks largely alone in hotel rooms while touring the world, which seems reminiscent of the way she wrote as a teenager alone in her bedroom while her career started to take shape.
I first found beabadoobee through Patched Up in 2018, back when her songs felt considerably smaller: acoustic guitars, softer vocals and that bedroom-pop intimacy that jumpstarted her success. Eight years later, it’s clear that those instincts haven’t disappeared. Instead, they’ve just gotten that much louder and even more confident.
You can especially hear that evolution happen in real time on the title track. Her distinct vocals remain the throughline as guitars and drums gradually begin to build around her, eventually leading to an explosive ending. “Estranged” follows a similar structure, balancing her signature intimate songwriting with louder production that she’s become increasingly comfortable exploring.
That balance continues to exist throughout the project, and it’s a record that fully leans into the grunge, shoegaze and alternative rock influences that have slowly crept into beabadoobee’s music over the years. But it doesn’t feel like she’s completely trading one version of herself for another. Instead, it seems like there are little pieces of her earlier work scattered throughout the album even through a new light.
The album’s heavier direction first became clear on “Sun Has Set,” which was an immediate and aggressive introduction to this new era, while “Switchblade” takes a slightly different approach production-wise. “Write Me a Letter” is a standout example of how much of a knack she’s always had for writing out feelings that might be hard to express over spoken words.
“In Motion” is one of the most beautiful moments on the album, where Bea sings about trying to stay afloat underneath a weight that has become too heavy. There’s that signature pickup halfway through the song, only to eventually fall back down into a quiet piano ending.
Much like the song title, Pylon fully feels like an album that was made in motion. Bea wrote a lot of it while touring, where she found herself yearning for familiarity and trying to understand what growing up actually looked like for her. Even the album’s title came from something incredibly ordinary she kept encountering along the way: pylons on the side of the road.
While I sit listening to Pylon on a rainy day in the Midwest, it’s impossible to not picture that exact scenery. These songs were made for staring out a car window at gray skies, endless highways, powerlines and pylons passing by. There is such a distinct Midwest grunge feeling woven throughout the album, even if that wasn’t necessarily where it was created.
That imagery becomes especially important on “Powerlines,” featuring Turnstile’s Brendan Yates. Instead of it feeling like an obvious feature, his presence naturally weaves itself into Bea’s world. The same can be said for Hayley Williams on the playful track “Nothing To Prove,” where her vocals pop up throughout the track without overtaking it. For an album with an impressive list of collaborators, they all feel intentionally woven into the world of Pylon.
Some of the most impactful moments, though, are the ones where Bea’s voice gets the chance to be the main focus point. “Spark” is an immediate standout for that reason, while “Despite That” brings the album back to the reality of being on the road before “Satellite” closes everything out looking upward.
The imagery that Bea continues to return to across Pylon is incredibly fitting. Pylons, powerlines and satellites are all things that can represent connection across distance, appearing throughout an album largely written while she was away from home trying to make sense of everything changing around her. There are obviously no clean answers waiting at the end of the road either. Sitting in the uncertainty is one of the things this project does best. As she puts it herself, the album became about “letting go and accepting change.”
Maybe that’s what makes the album feel so full-circle to me. I’ve watched beabadoobee grow from the artist I first discovered through Patched Up into someone preparing to headline arenas, and Pylon has proven that her sound has continued to expand alongside the stages she’s playing. It’s another step into that evolution and is easily one of my favorite records she’s made along the way.
