There has always been distortion somewhere in beabadoobee’s music.
Sometimes it sat right at the surface, as on the fuzzier moments of Fake It Flowers. Sometimes it was softened by the dreamy architecture of Beatopia. And on 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves, it frequently became part of a more polished kind of alternative pop, one that suggested Bea Laus was getting increasingly comfortable making records big enough to match the audiences now waiting for her.
On Pylon, her fourth album, she turns the guitars back up.
Released September 18 through Dirty Hit/Interscope, Pylon arrives two years after This Is How Tomorrow Moves and pushes beabadoobee toward a heavier collection of reference points: grunge, Midwest emo, ’90s alternative radio, and the sort of emotionally oversized guitar music that can make a private grievance sound enormous.
That direction is apparent in the album’s guest list alone. Hayley Williams is here. So are Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Deftones singer Chino Moreno, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, the 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, Basement’s Andrew Fisher, and Title Fight guitarist Shane Moran.
It is an almost absurd congregation of people from different branches of the modern guitar-music family tree. But Pylon is less interesting as an all-star indie-rock gathering than it is as evidence of how thoroughly beabadoobee has moved into the center of that world.
The record contains 14 songs:
“Pylon”
“Sun Has Set”
“Estranged”
“Switchblade”
“Write Me A Letter”
“It’s Alright”
“In Motion”
“Memories”
“Nothing To Prove”
“Radio”
“Powerlines”
“Spark”
“Despite That”
“Satellite”
The first real indication of the album’s temperament came with “Sun Has Set.” Laus described the song as coming from the things she wished she had said to someone — specifically a petty, almost claustrophobic feeling of simply hating that person.
That bluntness matters.
Beabadoobee has spent much of her career writing songs in which feelings arrive partially obscured: desire becomes nostalgia, anxiety becomes atmosphere, heartbreak gets buried underneath a guitar part pretty enough to distract you from what is happening in the lyric.
Pylon is interested in what happens when there is less distance between the feeling and the song.
Even its title suggests something structural and inelegant. A pylon is not supposed to be beautiful. It exists because something enormous needs to be held up.
And Pylon is frequently interested in enormous sounds.
That doesn't mean beabadoobee has suddenly made a hardcore record because Brendan Yates showed up, or a Deftones record because Chino Moreno did. The album instead treats those musicians — and the histories surrounding them — as part of a vocabulary that Laus has been gradually assembling for years.
Her relationship with ’90s guitar music has never been particularly hidden. What's changed is the confidence with which she manipulates it.
Earlier beabadoobee songs could sometimes feel like exceptionally good recreations of specific sensations: fuzzy guitars heard through bedroom walls, scratched CDs, coming-of-age movies, shoegaze pedals, Elliott Smith intimacy, Pavement looseness.
By Pylon, those references have become less like costumes and more like construction materials.
That distinction is important because beabadoobee occupies an unusual position in 2026 guitar music. She belongs simultaneously to an internet-native generation of pop stars and to an older indie-rock lineage that once depended on scenes, record stores, message boards, tiny venues, and obsessive genre distinctions.
Those worlds don't really exist separately anymore.
A listener can encounter Pinegrove, Deftones, Paramore, Turnstile, Title Fight, and beabadoobee through the same algorithm. Genres that once represented distinct subcultures now sit beside one another in a playlist.
Pylon sounds like a record made after that collapse.
The collaborators make that especially obvious. Hayley Williams represents a version of emo that eventually became arena-scale pop music. Moreno comes from a band whose mixture of heaviness and vulnerability has become foundational to another generation of alternative musicians. Yates helped Turnstile stretch hardcore toward something colorful and enormous without entirely abandoning its physicality. Stephens Hall comes from a much more intimate indie-rock tradition.
Then there is Laus herself, an artist who first became widely known through songs recorded with the immediacy of bedroom pop and who can now walk onto some of the largest stages in the world.
The distance between those things is basically the story of her career.
Before the album arrived, audiences had already started seeing that transformation happen in public. At Red Rocks in August, Laus debuted the title track during the encore, performing it alone on acoustic guitar and joking that listeners would have to imagine the instrumental parts that weren't there.
It's an amusing introduction to a record whose defining question might be exactly that: What happens when you fill in all that empty space?
On Pylon, the answer is guitars.
Lots of them.
But volume isn't really the destination. It's the mechanism.
The album's more revealing tension comes from hearing Laus' characteristically light voice surrounded by music capable of becoming much larger than it. Rather than attempting to overpower those arrangements, she often lets that contrast remain intact.
It is one of the reasons heavier music suits her.
A huge guitar does not necessarily require a huge vocal. Sometimes the most interesting person in the room is the one who refuses to shout.
That contrast also prevents Pylon from becoming straightforward ’90s revivalism. Beabadoobee may be drawing from an era when alternative rock dominated radio, but she doesn't sing like a rock star from that period. Her delivery retains the conversational quality that made her earliest recordings compelling.
The architecture has expanded around her while the person at its center remains recognizable.
That may be the real progression from This Is How Tomorrow Moves.
That album demonstrated how naturally beabadoobee could inhabit increasingly sophisticated production. Pylon asks what happens when sophistication is allowed to become messy again.
Distortion returns. Edges become visible. Songs can sound immediate without sounding unfinished.
And suddenly the enormous list of collaborators makes sense.
They're not there to transform beabadoobee into something else.
They're entering a musical world she has spent years moving toward.
The fascinating thing about Pylon isn't that the bedroom-pop kid grew up and discovered loud guitars. Those guitars were there from the beginning.
It's that she finally has a room big enough to let them ring.
