Pylon: beabadoobee gets loud and stays impatient

Pylon is beabadoobee's loudest record and her most impatient one. It is the fourth album from Beatrice Laus, out on Dirty Hit with Interscope: fourteen tracks and a habit of leaving the room before you have settled into it. The distortion is the point. So is the moment she steps away from it.

The four records behind it trace a slow widening. Fake It Flowers arrived in 2020, Beatopia in 2022, This Is How Tomorrow Moves in 2024, and this is her first release through Interscope in partnership with Dirty Hit, the label that has carried her from the start. She began in 2019 as an eighteen-year-old indie newcomer with a guitar and a plain voice, and her influences have never been hidden: Elliott Smith and Stephen Malkmus, and the '90s records around them. She has made merch in Smith's image, covered him for two charity compilations, named him in a song and given Malkmus a title of his own.

Pylon was made with live instrumentation and a clear turn toward '90s rock. Matty Healy and George Daniel of the 1975 produced 'Write Me A Letter'. Turnstile's Brendan Yates plays on 'Powerlines'. Hayley Williams of Paramore sings on 'Nothing To Prove'. The subject is the middle of your twenties, and the discovery that the clarity you waited for at seventeen does not arrive on schedule.

The title track opens it with rich, fleeting guitars and a passing string, her falsetto gliding over the top. The pylon is the image the record keeps returning to: a structure built to hold a line across empty ground, something trying to stay connected in a place designed for isolation.

'Sun Has Set', the lead single, is where the volume first lands, a guitar figure that jumps out of the headphones and hits as relief. 'Switchblade' does the opposite. The tempo is drawn back, overdriven guitar sits over a rhythmic bass, and the vocal is filtered down into something conversational, closer to talking than singing.

'Write Me A Letter' compresses the whole album: warm strummed tones swinging into heavy distortion and half-time drums, the swing and the drop arriving in the same breath. 'Nothing To Prove' is the raucous one, a mellow-toned Hayley Williams trading lines with Laus, built for a room with people in it. 'Powerlines' takes the glitchiest route, Yates pushing the guitar into harder ground. And 'Satellite' closes at 4:45, soft vocals knocked out into a belt while layered amplified and distorted guitars cut underneath, the one track that lets the record be big rather than fast.

This is for people who want guitars first and answers second, the ones who wore the debut's grit out on 'Sorry' and 'Dye It Red', and anyone who keeps Pavement and Pinegrove within reach in the same week. If you want the songs to sit still, most of this will feel like being hurried.

What does not work is the cutting away. 'Despite That' barely states its case before it is gone, and across a side the brevity stops reading as confidence and starts reading as a refusal to finish a thought. Brevity is a weapon on 'Sun Has Set'. Somewhere in the second half it becomes a habit, and the record's strongest moments are the ones that go long.

Pylon is a 3.5. Louder and looser than anything she has released, with guests who earn their credits and a handful of songs that earn their distortion. 'Satellite' takes all the time it needs. Several of its neighbours take none.

The tracklist

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