Beabadoobee released Pylon on September 18 through Dirty Hit and Interscope Records, a 14-track fourth album that trades the dreamy indie-pop of her previous records for distorted guitars, live drums, and a roster of collaborators pulled from the grunge, hardcore, and emo lineages that Beatrice Laus has cited as formative influences since her earliest recordings. The album features Hayley Williams of Paramore on “Nothing to Prove,” Turnstile vocalist Brendan Yates on “Powerlines,” Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran, who also co-produced the record alongside Laus and Luca Buccellati. The 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel handled production on “Write Me a Letter.” For an artist who broke through on lo-fi bedroom recordings and built her audience through three increasingly polished indie albums, Pylon is a deliberate left turn toward the volume and emotional directness that Laus has been circling for years.
Key Takeaways
- Pylon is beabadoobee’s fourth studio album, released September 18 via Dirty Hit and Interscope Records
- Collaborators include Hayley Williams (Paramore), Brendan Yates (Turnstile), Chino Moreno (Deftones), Evan Stephens Hall (Pinegrove), Shane Moran (Title Fight), Matty Healy and George Daniel (The 1975)
- The album was co-produced by Laus, Shane Moran, and Luca Buccellati, with Healy and Daniel producing “Write Me a Letter”
- Lead single “Sun Has Set” arrived in June with a video directed by Laus’ partner and longtime visual collaborator Jake Erland
- The Powerlines Tour, beabadoobee’s first arena run, launches October 1 at Mohegan Sun Arena and includes Madison Square Garden, The Kia Forum, and The O2 in London
- Pylon follows 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves, which became beabadoobee’s first UK number-one album
The Guest List Reads Like a Roll Call of Laus’ Formative Influences
What separates Pylon’s collaborations from the typical feature-stacking that drives album rollouts is that every name on the tracklist connects to a specific lineage beabadoobee has been referencing since the start of her career. Hayley Williams singing on “Nothing to Prove” is not a left-field pairing. Laus has spoken publicly about Paramore’s influence on her understanding of how pop melody and punk energy coexist in the same song. The track itself, described in the album’s press materials as “a deeply anthemic indie-rock song about getting your power back from fairweather friends who just want a bit of your success,” places Williams in a context that draws on Paramore’s Riot and Brand New Eyes eras while wrapping the sentiment in beabadoobee’s own lyrical voice.
Brendan Yates’ verse on “Powerlines” operates in a different register entirely. Turnstile’s frontman built his reputation on matching vocal force with emotional nuance across two albums that redefined what hardcore could sound like to audiences who had never been to a basement show. Placing Yates’ voice inside a beabadoobee track gives “Powerlines” a weight that Laus could not have achieved as a solo vocal performance, and the pairing signals that Pylon is not reaching for the indie-pop adjacency of her earlier records. Chino Moreno of Deftones, Evan Stephens Hall of Pinegrove, and Shane Moran of Title Fight fill out a contributor list that spans shoegaze, alt-metal, midwest emo, and post-hardcore. Each of these artists carries a specific sonic vocabulary, and Laus’ willingness to bring all of them into a single 14-track album speaks to the range of influences she is trying to synthesize rather than flatten.
The production credits reinforce that ambition. Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975, who have known Laus since early in her career through the Dirty Hit label ecosystem, produced “Write Me a Letter.” Their involvement adds a layer of electronic production sophistication to one corner of the record while the rest of the album leans into raw, guitar-driven arrangements. The tension between those two production approaches, one polished and texturally complex, the other loud and direct, gives Pylon its structural dynamic across 14 tracks.
“Sun Has Set” Announced the Sonic Shift in June
The album’s lead single, “Sun Has Set,” arrived on June 24 alongside a video directed by Jake Erland, Laus’ partner and longtime visual collaborator. The song announced Pylon’s sonic direction in unambiguous terms. Propulsive, distorted guitar and live drums drive the track forward with a kinetic energy that beabadoobee had only hinted at on previous records. The vocal delivery carries an intensity that surprised listeners who associated the artist primarily with the softer, more atmospheric textures of Fake It Flowers and Beatopia.
Laus’ own description of the song was characteristically blunt. “A lot of the songs on this record are things I wish I could have said to someone,” Laus said when the single launched. “This song has this petty tunnel vision. It’s like, ‘I hate you.’ You’re gonna stay here and listen to how much I hate you. Because I never got to say that.” That statement set the emotional tone for the album cycle months before the full tracklist was public. Pylon is not a record built on ambiguity or emotional distance. It is direct in its anger, specific in its targets, and constructed to make that directness hit at volume.
The second pre-album single, a collaboration with The Marias titled “All I Did Was Dream of You,” had already been performing well on the alternative chart, reaching the Top 25 by the time the album announcement dropped. That track, released in March 2026, occupied a softer, more melodic space than “Sun Has Set,” which gave listeners two distinct entry points into the album and demonstrated that Pylon would not be a single-gear record despite its overall heavier direction.
The Title Carries a Dual Meaning That Maps the Album’s Themes
Pylon is named for the steel electricity towers that line highways and rail corridors across the world. Laus has said the structures became a fixation during the extensive touring that followed This Is How Tomorrow Moves, when she found herself staring at pylons through van and bus windows during long stretches of isolation on the road. The towers reminded her of the connection to friends and family at home that she was missing, and the image became a symbol for the album’s central preoccupation: the distance between being physically present on stage every night and feeling emotionally disconnected from the people who matter outside the venue.
The title also functions as a description of the album’s sonic character. Pylons carry electrical current. The record carries distortion, volume, and a crackling energy that runs through even its quieter moments. The metaphor is not subtle, and Laus has not tried to make it subtle. Pylon is a record about power, about the tension between isolation and connection, and about the anger that builds when that tension goes unresolved for months at a time on tour. The collaborators Laus chose reinforce that framework. Williams, Yates, Moreno, and Moran all built their careers in genres where emotional honesty delivered at high volume is the fundamental currency.
The tracklist sequences the album’s emotional arc across 14 songs. The opening title track establishes the tone. “Sun Has Set” follows with the album’s most aggressive statement. “Estranged” and “Switchblade” maintain the intensity before “Write Me a Letter,” the Healy and Daniel-produced track, introduces a textural shift. “Nothing to Prove” with Williams and “Powerlines” with Yates arrive in the album’s back half, landing at the point where the record has already earned the weight those collaborations carry. “Satellite” closes the album.
From Bedroom Recordings to Madison Square Garden in Six Years
beabadoobee’s trajectory from a teenager uploading songs to SoundCloud to an artist headlining arenas has moved faster than most careers in the current music landscape. Her debut single “Coffee,” released in 2017, was interpolated by Powfu in the viral TikTok hit “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head),” which introduced Laus’ voice to an audience that had no context for who she was or what kind of music she made. That accidental introduction became the foundation for a recording career that has now produced four studio albums, five EPs, and a fanbase loyal enough to fill Madison Square Garden.
Fake It Flowers (2020) reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart. Beatopia (2022) climbed to number four. This Is How Tomorrow Moves (2024) hit number one. Each album expanded Laus’ audience while gradually shifting her sound from bedroom indie toward something more muscular and band-driven. Pylon accelerates that shift. Where This Is How Tomorrow Moves added polish and structural ambition, Pylon strips the polish back and replaces it with raw volume, distortion, and collaborative energy pulled from the specific corner of alternative music where Laus’ personal taste has always lived, even when her released recordings occupied a softer space.
The Powerlines Tour, which supports the album, reflects the scale of that audience growth. The run kicks off October 1 at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, and moves through Madison Square Garden in New York on October 5, The Kia Forum in Los Angeles, and The O2 in London, along with arena dates across the UK and Europe. Wisp supports the U.S., Canada, and UK dates. Violet Grohl supports shows in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. For beabadoobee, these are first-ever arena headline shows, a venue tier that requires not just the audience size to fill the rooms but the stage production and sonic presence to make the performance work at that scale. Pylon, with its heavier guitars and louder arrangements, sounds like a record designed to fill those rooms.
Where Pylon Sits in beabadoobee’s Growing Catalog
Each beabadoobee album has functioned as a distinct chapter rather than an iteration of a fixed sound. Fake It Flowers leaned into ’90s shoegaze and grunge nostalgia filtered through a bedroom recording aesthetic. Beatopia was more eclectic, pulling from bossa nova, surf rock, and folk alongside its indie-rock foundation. This Is How Tomorrow Moves streamlined the songwriting and sharpened the production, resulting in a record that connected with the mainstream UK chart audience in a way the previous albums had not.
Pylon represents another recalibration. The album does not abandon melody, but it buries it under heavier instrumentation and rawer vocal takes. The collaborators bring textures that the previous records could not access. And the thematic focus on anger, disconnection, and the emotional toll of touring gives the lyrics a specificity that earlier records, which often dealt in more abstract emotional landscapes, did not always achieve.
Whether Pylon’s harder direction expands beabadoobee’s audience beyond the indie and alternative listeners who have followed her from the beginning will depend on how the Powerlines Tour translates the album’s energy into a live setting and whether the collaborations drive new listeners toward the full record rather than just the featured tracks. What the album makes clear is that Laus is not interested in repeating the formula that gave her a UK number one. She made a louder, angrier, more collaborative record because that is where her taste was pointing, and the guest list she assembled suggests she has the relationships and the credibility to pull from the genres she grew up listening to rather than gesturing at them from the outside.
FAQs
Who Are the Featured Artists on beabadoobee’s Pylon?
Pylon features Hayley Williams of Paramore on “Nothing to Prove,” Turnstile vocalist Brendan Yates on “Powerlines,” Deftones’ Chino Moreno, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran. The 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel produced the track “Write Me a Letter.”
When Does the Powerlines Tour Start?
The Powerlines Tour launches October 1, 2026, at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. The run includes arena dates at Madison Square Garden in New York on October 5, The Kia Forum in Los Angeles, and The O2 in London, with additional shows across the UK and Europe.
How Does Pylon Sound Compared to beabadoobee’s Previous Albums?
Pylon draws on grunge, midwest emo, and ’90s radio rock, marking a heavier and more direct sonic shift from the indie-pop and shoegaze textures of Fake It Flowers, Beatopia, and This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Lead single “Sun Has Set” features distorted guitars and live drums that set the tone for the album’s louder, more aggressive direction.
What Label Released Pylon?
Pylon was released on September 18, 2026, through Dirty Hit and Interscope Records. Dirty Hit has been beabadoobee’s label home since the beginning of her recording career.
