Beabadoobee wants to be the band you encounter after a zombie apocalypse, perhaps in the closing scene of a reimagined Mad Max. Her latest record, Pylon, out via Dirty Hit and Interscope on 18 September, is one that harks back to teenage intuition and pure catharsis, fighting the social conditioning of a West London girls’ school to arrive at something unadulterated, raw and fundamentally her own.
In her vision, the world has ended. You are walking down a deserted road, dust in the air, when the familiar iron geometry of a pylon appears on the horizon. Beneath it, improbably, a band is playing. “And I’m the band,” she tells me over Zoom, delighted by the bleakness of it. “So you’re the soundtrack to the post-apocalyptic rebranding of humanity?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Everyone’s a zombie. That’s the vibe.”
As a recently minted Australian myself, I reassure her that the Mad Max reference will play well here. This is, after all, a country that exported road warriors, chrome-mouthed zealots and Tina Turner in chainmail to the world. But the London-based singer’s apocalypse is less about total destruction than what remains when the noise stops: an electrical structure, a handful of people, an instrument, a signal still travelling somewhere. Even at its most dystopian, Pylon is about connection.
“Who I am right now, and who I was when I was making the record, is the closest I’ve ever been to who I was at 19.”
The title sent me down a different, dustier road. Pylon is also the name of the angular post-punk band whose nervous rhythms and economical guitar music became a foundational influence on the American underground, and I assumed, on beabadoobee, too. For an artist whose taste has long pulled from the sediment of alternative music – Kimya Dawson, Pavement, Elliott Smith, Daniel Johnston, Pinegrove – it felt entirely plausible. In a nerdy RUSSH exclusive, she confesses, “I didn’t realise there was a band called Pylon until I made the record. Somebody was like, ‘Do you know there’s a band called Pylon?’ I started getting into them.” So, in a strange twist, she became a Pylon convert by accidentally referencing them.
For beabadoobie (Beatrice Laus), pylons became markers of continuity while touring, carrying invisible currents across impossible distances. They reminded her that a line still ran between her and the people she loved. The forthcoming album is about communication, connection and the golden thread home. Written while touring 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves, the album gathers the feelings Laus had pushed aside on the road. Yet its line does not only connect her to friends and family, it runs backwards, towards an earlier version of herself.
“Who I am right now, and who I was when I was making the record, is the closest I’ve ever been to who I was at 19,” she says. “The music I was making, the way I was dressing. I felt like I knew myself so much more then. Obviously, I’ve grown in a lot of other ways, but I feel like I had something going on when I was 19. She just didn’t care, and I really admire that version of myself.”
“The industry is crazy at times. You can get lost in the noise and feel detached; there are so many ups and downs. I feel like I lost myself for a bit.”
Laus is returning to comfortable clothes, instinctive decisions and the freedom of not wondering how every gesture will appear from the outside. “That feels empowering to me,” she tells me. “In a weird way, this is the closest I’ve been to who I was as a teenager.” Perhaps, I suggest, she knew herself intuitively before the industry diverted her, and Pylon is a kind of return home, a lifeline calling her back?
“Exactly. The industry is crazy at times. You can get lost in the noise and feel detached; there are so many ups and downs. I feel like I lost myself for a bit.”
Since Coffee escaped her bedroom in 2017, Laus’s musical world has expanded rapidly. Oscar Lang helped shape Patched Up and Loveworm, while guitarist Jacob Bugden became a longstanding collaborator. Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975 worked on Our Extended Play and remained in the orbit of “Beatopia,” which also featured PinkPantheress, Cavetown and Bombay Bicycle Club’s Jack Steadman. Clairo joined Glue Song; Laufey appeared on A Night to Remember; and The Marías met her on All I Did Was Dream of You. Rick Rubin then co-produced This Is How Tomorrow Moves alongside Bugden. Laus has a roster that most labels would envy, the names have grown without swamping or distorting her own voice.
Still, This Is How Tomorrow Moves arrived with the seduction of resolution. “I was so sure that I had it all figured out with my last record,” she says. “It was like, I’ve got rid of all the people who did me wrong; this is what it means to be an adult and to be in your mid-20s. It wasn’t necessarily the reality, but it was what I felt and what I was writing about at the time.”
“Once the tour was over, I had no choice but to confront all the feelings I’d tucked under the rug while I was away; things that happened on the road that I now had to face and try to navigate. I couldn’t. and I’m still trying to figure it out. The beauty of Pylon is that it expresses that. There isn’t necessarily an answer.”
If that record came after chaos, Pylon lets chaos back in; through classic grunge, Midwest emo, 1990s radio rock and a voice left close to breaking. “Once the tour was over, I had no choice but to confront all the feelings I’d tucked under the rug while I was away,” Laus says. “Things that happened on the road that I now had to face and try to navigate. I couldn’t. and I’m still trying to figure it out. The beauty of Pylon is that it expresses that. There isn’t necessarily an answer.”
The new collaborators form a map of the guitar music that shaped her. Hayley Williams appears on Nothing to Prove; Turnstile’s Brendan Yates joins Powerlines; and Deftones frontman Chino Moreno, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall and Title Fight guitarist Shane Moran also contribute. Matty Healy and George Daniel returned to produce Write Me a Letter, while Laus co-produced the wider album with Moran and Luca Buccellati.
The Pinegrove contribution carries particular emotional voltage. Laus has three musician tattoos: one for Elliott Smith, one for Daniel Johnston and one for Pinegrove. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to have at least one,’” she says of inviting her heroes onto the album. “I would have said Evan from Pinegrove, but he wrote on this record, which is mind-boggling. I forget sometimes because it’s too overwhelming to think about. Once a fangirl, always a fangirl…” When working with Hall, she wore her hair down to hide the Pinegrove tattoo and voice memos from him still make her panic, in the best way, of course.
“The song contains everything I wished I could have said to that person, and a lot of it is stuff I don’t even mean. But I had to get it off my chest and we’re actually fine now – it was just something I had to express in order to get over it in my head.”
In terms of future collaborators, she’s starting to manifest Kele Okereke of Bloc Party. “Even if nothing came of it, I think he’s a legend,” she says. “I’d like to sit in a room with him and watch him play guitar.” She supported Bloc Party when she was around 21; success has not cured her of awe.
Laus isn’t interested in presenting a perfected self and has been musing on how she is perceived. On Pylon, anger and jealousy are not sanded into tasteful metaphors. Sun Has Set is confrontational, propelled by what she calls tunnel vision. For a woman formed within an English girls’ school, direct anger can feel like a violation and ‘not the done thing.’ Laus violates it anyway.
“I was driven by such a strong feeling of anger,” she says. “The song contains everything I wished I could have said to that person, and a lot of it is stuff I don’t even mean. But I had to get it off my chest and we’re actually fine now;” she says laughing, “it was just something I had to express in order to get over it in my head.”
She describes herself, with disarming bluntness, as “immature and crazy and toxic”. Anger and jealousy may resemble toxic traits, she says, but underneath they are vulnerable, and often embarrassing feelings. “When I write music, I’m not thinking about how many people will listen to it,” she says. “I’m just desperate to get it off my chest.” It is necessary catharsis, I suggest? Irrespective of the attention, it simply has to come out. “It just has to come out,” she confirms. Only afterwards does she remember that the diary will be published, streamed and shouted back by thousands of people.
“When I write music, I’m not thinking about how many people will listen to it, I’m just desperate to get it off my chest.”
“To me, Pylon, and the music I make, generally, is ultimately a selfish thing because I’m doing it for myself,” she tells me. A listener feeling understood, or starting to play music after seeing her is a bonus, albeit a meaningful one. “Every time I put something out, it’s like: holy shit, everyone’s reading my diary.”
Onstage, Laus transports herself back to the feeling that made a song. During her run of Laneway Festival shows in 2025, she sometimes cried while performing Beaches on stage. Its chorus insists, “I’m sure now / I’m sure” while she felt unsure about everything. Singing it felt like a lie until memory returned its original truth. “When I tap into that feeling and remember how I felt, that’s how I perform and bring the catharsis to the stage,” she says. It is muscle memory for the heart, I suggest. It takes a muscle to fall in love, after all…
The coming tour will complicate that exercise: Laus will perform songs about touring while touring. “If I’m going to cry, I’ll let myself cry. If I’m going to scream, I’ll let myself scream.” At points across Pylon, Laus’s voice seems poised at the edge of damage. “There’s a beauty in imperfection,” Laus says. “I used to be scared, thinking, ‘Oh my God, do I sound good in this song?’ But I’m playing with a live band. This is live music. I’m going to live in this moment and live through the song. I have no choice but to.”
“If I’m going to cry, I’ll let myself cry. If I’m going to scream, I’ll let myself scream.”
Australia, Laus tells me, was among the first places she felt resonance. Some of her earliest listeners came from here, a fact that still confounds her. “I lived in England. How the hell were they finding the music?” Her previous visits have been fleeting, dominated by festivals and, memorably, illness. At Laneway she was so unwell that she resolved she would die onstage if required. Now that she’s officially announced her Australia 2027 tour, she wants to give the audience the complete show it deserves.
She also likes the way Australians say her name giving a charming rendition of ‘beabadoobee’ with the upspeak.
Beabadoobee will be touring Australia in March 2027. We’ve got you covered with all the latest ticket and tour date information.
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