Beabadoobee Lets Softness and Noise Collide on Pylon

On her fourth album, beabadoobee turns frustration, nostalgia and a far heavier guitar palette into a record that works best when its sweetness and noise are allowed to clash.

Photo: Erika Kamano

On Pylon, beabadoobee sounds like someone has kicked the bedroom door open halfway through a thought. The softness is still there, as are those melodies that have always made her songs feel oddly familiar on first listen, but now they are fighting for space with louder guitars, frustration and feelings that refuse to arrive neatly packaged.

Her fourth album was written on the road while touring This Is How Tomorrow Moves, and some of that restless energy sticks to its 14 tracks. Pylon rarely wants to sit quietly with anything. Feelings get picked at, replayed, complained about and, when that fails, buried beneath a guitar.

“Sun Has Set” makes that frustration obvious early on. There is bite to it, but the more interesting thing is how natural Bea sounds with that extra weight behind her. “Switchblade” pushes further into the scruffier side of the record, while her voice stays light enough to stop everything around it becoming too heavy-handed.

That relationship between Bea and the noise is where Pylon starts getting properly fun.

On paper, the collaborator list is almost distracting. Hayley Williams, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Chino Moreno and Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall all contribute to the record, yet none of those names drown out the songwriter at the centre of it.

“Write Me A Letter” gets that balance particularly right. Produced by Matty Healy and George Daniel, it begins closer to the sweetness we already know before allowing the guitars to press in around it. There is something vulnerable underneath all that size, and it makes the song a far better example of what Pylon is doing than simply sticking a “grunge” label across the album.

Photo: Erika Kamano

Because Bea does not suddenly stop being good at softness just because the amps have been turned up.

“Memories” proves it. Built around a gentler acoustic pull, it deals in the strange sadness of looking back at something happy and realising you would quite like to climb inside it again. Bea has called it one of the happiest songs on the album, despite describing the feeling behind it as clinging to moments that should make you happy but somehow leave you sad instead.

Very cheerful stuff, obviously.

It works because beabadoobee has always been good at making emotional confusion sound simple. She rarely makes you fight your way through a lyric to understand what hurts. Sometimes on Pylon, though, that directness becomes its weakness too.

There are moments where you want the writing to dig another layer deeper. The production can feel huge, restless and full of detail while a lyric occasionally reaches the feeling and stops there. With so much happening around her, there are places where a little more specificity could have made the hit land harder.

Still, forcing Bea into denser writing would probably miss some of what makes her songs work. There is charm in how quickly she can move from irritation to tenderness without making a big performance of either.

The guests make most sense under that same rule. Hayley Williams joins “Nothing To Prove”, while Brendan Yates appears on “Powerlines”, but neither song suddenly becomes about the famous name attached to it. They slot into Pylon rather than stopping it in its tracks.

Then comes “Satellite”. Chino Moreno appears on the closing track, but it still feels entirely connected to the uncertainty running through the rest of the album. It reads less like a neat breakup than that horrible feeling of still circling something you know has moved away from you. The song gradually gets bigger without handing you a tidy conclusion afterwards.

It would be weird if this album suddenly had everything figured out.

Across Pylon, adulthood feels less like a destination and more like getting slightly better at recognising your own mess. The record moves through irritation, nostalgia, relationships and distance without pretending those feelings disappear once you understand where they came from.

That is also why the heavier direction works. The guitars give those feelings somewhere to go. They can turn ugly when they need to, then disappear enough for a melody to do the damage instead.

The timing makes sense too. Pylon arrives ahead of beabadoobee’s first arena headline run, with the Powerlines Tour reaching Glasgow, Cardiff, Manchester and London’s O2 in November. There is no shortage of songs here built for rooms that size.

But bigger does not mean she has thrown away the version of herself people came for in the first place. Pylon still has the sweetness, awkward admissions and melodies that stick around after the song finishes. They have simply got considerably noisier company.

She does not need to choose between softness and noise. Pylon is strongest when she lets them fight it out.