beabadoobee has released her hugely anticipated and already-acclaimed new album Pylon, available to stream and buy in digital, CD and vinyl formats via Dirty Hit / Interscope Records. Pylon, the follow up to beabadoobee’s UK number 1 record This Is How Tomorrow Moves, is an album that is more wide-ranging and complex than anything that she has ever put out - a tannic rock record that is, at various points, angry, lonesome, ecstatic, depressed and deeply, pathologically in love.
The album is heralded by new single ‘Write Me A Letter,’ a thrumming indie-rock track featuring production work from Beatrice Laus’ longtime collaborators and labelmates Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975. The song is about, says Laus: “seeing my fault in situations, but also admitting things that I would be too embarrassed to say out loud.” ‘Write Me A Letter’ is the kind of song she needed, not wanted, to get out and this album proved the perfect vessel.
“I had to write these songs on tour or between tours because I had to understand what was going on in my head,” she says. “It’s this idea of letting go and accepting change. When I was on tour, I was yearning for something, and it made me think: How do I make myself feel comfortable? What does it mean to grow up? I was just missing how things were.”
The songs here, including the singles ‘Memories’, ‘Switchblade’ and ‘Sun Has Set’, are raw and sometimes uncomfortably real, recalling the Laus who poured her life into songs as a teenager for the world to hear. She says it’s the result of writing alone in hotel rooms, which “reminded me a lot of how I wrote songs at 17, alone in my bedroom, feeling sad as fuck.”
The album features contributions from a host of artists that teenage Bea could then only dream of collaborating with but now finds as peers, including Hayley Williams, Turnstile singer Brendan Yates, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Title Fight’s Shane Moran.
But there are no clear answers, and that’s the point—Laus is, emphatically, past the time in which she thought she could ever have everything figured out. Pylon, for all its turbulent emotions, kind of celebrates that not knowing; its brilliance suggests that sitting with uncertainty can create something immense.
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