Muffled, faint voices appear and fade away. An acoustic guitar plucks a calm melody. And then, a soft intimate voice emerges. beabadoobee opens her fourth studio album with her most gentle imagery of love to date: “And when I’m somewhere / At least we’re connected / Like a pylon on an open road.” Her voice glides over a dreamy, hopeful production—a tender sound that gradually builds into a mesh of electric guitar and atmospheric synths. The lyrics pass between exchanges of lovers finding each other miles apart, her sweet voice flipping between melodies. Then suddenly, the song explodes.
With the first track on “Pylon,” Beatrice Laus—known professionally as beabadoobee—makes it clear that her newest studio album is nothing like her last. In 2024’s “This Is How Tomorrow Moves,” beabadoobee blended dream pop, folk and jazz elements in an album about self-acceptance and growing up. This combination resulted in a project that boded well for longtime fans and warm acoustic lovers—take buzzy, sugared hit single “Beaches” for instance. However, the hard rock and grunge elements struggle to become fully realized in this project. “Post,” for instance, turns the previous project a bit rowdy with thick guitars and thriving drums. But the production here is only a part-commitment to the hard rock genre.
“Pylon” proved to take these subtle rock moments of beabadoobee’s discography much further. On June 24, 2026, she kicked off her newest era with the release of “Sun Has Set,” the first single for her fourth album. The track rushes with aggression, employing raw guitar fuzz and an emotionally furious vocal delivery—a rockstar energy unlike anything listeners have heard from her before. Full of vengeance in the music video, she is smashing car windows and chasing the camera, which seems to be from the point of view of her ex-lover. The lyrics display an even larger, direct attack: “When I say, ‘We’ll never be friends’ / I mean we’ll never pretend / Fuck that, you can never run back to me now / The sun has set.”
Playing “Pylon,” it becomes evident that such sonic invasiveness takes precedent in much of the tracklist. On “Switchblade,” beabadoobee sings about navigating insecurity and emotional confusion surrounding relationship problems while coasting along a down-tempo drum-heavy rhythm. Or with “In Motion,”she mixes similar grungy production elements with a more cathartic, “screaming into the void” melody about escaping the overwhelming, anxious thoughts in her mind. This emotional bond she creates between the intense sensations of love and hard rock is very effective in placing the listener within the chaotic perplexity of beabadoobee as a 26-year-old—one who must balance heart-breaking exes, fresh romantic partners and fame all at once.
But just in case these production changes did not make beabadoobee’s’ shift in direction clear, in comes Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates: obvious frontrunners of the modern alternative rock scene. On “Nothing to Prove,” beabadoobee and Williams create a jumpy, beating energy of guitar riffs and smooth harmonies. Here, beabadoobee reinforces her choice to create any type of music she wants, a clear “get lost” to anyone who thinks she is not worthy enough to enter this new scene: “I got it / I flaunt it… / ’Cause I’ve got nothing to prove.” With the track “Powerline,” beabadoobee utilizes Yates to develop a darker, more distant sound by overlaying their melancholic vocals.
Nonetheless, “Pylon” certainly still has an older, more tender beabadoobee running through its veins. The album’s cheery third single, “Memories”—which she noted as one of the happiest songs on the project—talks about romanticizing the past. The dream pop production here creates an upbeat, nostalgic feeling, reminiscent of a track that could be placed on her dreamy, eclectic 2022 project, “Beatopia.” The lyricism, however, is still not all that bright: lingering in the past leads beabadoobee to a trap of sadness as she wishes she could go back to those happy memories. Similarly, on “Estranged,” she dips into a sunny, The Cure-esque vigor where she embraces a full jangle-pop production that feels a bit lighter than the rest of the record. Still, despite the radiant indie-pop instrumentation here, the lyrics still succumb to her feelings of the isolation and messiness of her mid-twenties: “Feeling estranged, yeah / Gotta mean it, beat it / But I don’t wanna feel it.”
This is not to say that beabadoobee’s previous records were depersonalized and spiritless. In fact, she has always been one of the best at meshing catchy bedroom pop with a tactful indie-rock aesthetic. But with “Pylon,” the listener gets the sense that she is at her most comfortable, finally coming into herself as an artist. “It’s Alright” displays her most confident—and earnest—vocals to date. She floats along a blurry electric-stringed beat, creating an obsessive melody you simply cannot get out of your head. In “Radio,” her distorted guitar overpowers with a self-assured style, creating a soundscape the listener is meant to lose themselves in.
The highlight of “Pylon” comes with its closing song. “Satellite” begins with a simple, light guitar strum and beabadoobee’s delicate voice. Suddenly, almost out of silence, she cries out. A rush of crushing rock production takes the frame in mere seconds as she sings of a deep desire to reconnect with herself and others. The remainder of the track shifts between bittersweet guitar plucks with ruminating rhythms and more surges of severe, distorted alt-rock production—a final reminder to the listener to embrace her intimate, cosmic sound.
The final moments of the album returns to a musical motif listeners have heard once before: a sonic explosion remnant of the one from the opening track. Though this time, the theme does not serve to introduce beabadoobee’s raw, heavy alt-rock framework. Instead, it brings it to a grand fade away: her final display that she is breaking away, triumphantly, from her previous sonic norms, unrestrained at last.