Pylon is Raw, Raging, and Beabadoobee's Best Yet
Beabadoobee, known for entering music with a soft bedroom-pop feel that eventually edged into rock, has returned with Pylon, her most refined exploration of her sound's dynamics yet.
Having been around for the very beginning of Beabadoobee's career, I remember the intimacy of songs like “Coffee,” a track that was close to the listener in its simplicity. There was something special about hearing those early songs as they came out, when the bedroom-pop quality of her music made it feel like you were being let into a small, private world rather than simply listening to a polished recording. “Coffee” in particular became a staple of that early period, with its stripped-back instrumentation and romantic vulnerability making it feel almost conversational.
That softness has never completely disappeared from Beabadoobee's music, but it has expanded. What began with intimate recordings has gradually developed into something much larger and more sonically restless, incorporating guitars, distortion, and a punch of rock without losing the vulnerability that made her early work so compelling. Pylon feels like less of a departure from that version of Beabadoobee than the natural result of years spent figuring out how much space that vulnerability can occupy. The evolution is especially striking because a direct emotional thread still connects that early work to what she is doing now. T
Opening with the title track, “Pylon” immediately establishes itself as a soft love song with a looming melancholy, centered around craving connection. The song's imagery of being disconnected from reality while still finding some form of connection through another person immediately introduces the emotional tension that runs throughout the record.
The album captures the disillusionment of being on the road and separated from the people you love, while also bringing in the strange intimacy of being heard from afar. Something almost meta about the record is its fascination with connection through radio, power lines, roads, and distance, as Beabadoobee is deeply connected to the art she's built her life around while also confronting everything that comes with turning that art into a career. The artist has described feeling deeply lonely on the road and finding an unusual connection to home by seeing pylons from her tour bus, which ultimately inspired the record's title.
That tension becomes visceral throughout Pylon. The record constantly moves between softness and frustration, with angrier tracks like “Sun Has Set.” The effect is almost bodily, as if the record cannot sit still because its narrator cannot either.
Beabadoobee doesn't let the album stay in one sonic space for too long, and that restlessness mirrors the emotional pace of the story her lyrics tell. “Switchblade” and “Spark” are particularly striking in how they pair evocative, almost body-horror imagery with the record's interiority. In “Switchblade,” emotional exhaustion becomes something sharp, defensive, and physical, with the song repeatedly questioning whether to fight or flee.
That imagery matters because Pylon is translating emotional feelings into physical ones. Anger becomes heat. Exhaustion becomes something that wears the body thin. Connection becomes something visible outside of a tour bus window. And Beabadoobee changes the sound without much warning. Rather than relying on gentle lead-ins to prepare the listener for every transition, the record can snap from one emotional state into another. That lack of warning beautifully captures the feeling of being on the road, never quite able to ground yourself in one place, and how instability can begin to manifest internally. The distortion and heavier instrumentation don't simply make the album sound more aggressive. They give the emotional exhaustion somewhere to live.
This is where Pylon feels like such a natural evolution of Beabadoobee's work. Her earlier bedroom-pop sensibilities haven't left her. Instead, they sit alongside something much more abrasive. The record's classic grunge, Midwest emo, and '90s radio rock influences become part of a larger sonic language that allows softness and aggression to coexist rather than treating them as opposing identities.
Pulling back the layers of what it means to always be active in your career, Beabadoobee doesn't shy away from expressing burnout and the ways it can directly impact the relationships she so clearly longs for. Anger is present, but so is gentleness. The two emotions don't cancel each other out. Instead, they clash, blend into one another, and become more powerful because of the instrumentals surrounding them.
That emotional contradiction is also what makes the album's collaborations feel so significant. With features including rock legend Hayley Williams on “Nothing To Prove,” alongside contributions from artists including Chino Moreno, Brendan Yates, and Evan Stephens Hall, Pylon becomes a collective work that feels connected to a larger history of alternative and rock music. Something particularly striking is Beabadoobee carrying that torch while still letting the softer elements of being a rock artist exist without treating femininity, tenderness, or vulnerability as contradictions to heaviness. The balance of softness and rock doesn't simply feel like a trick or a way to show off her range. Instead, it feels directly tied to what is being articulated. These are stories about falling in love and craving connection while being forced to go without it. The music has to move between those extremes because the emotions themselves do.
In that way, Pylon becomes more than just a record about touring. It becomes a record about what happens when the life you dreamed about begins to resemble something much more complicated once you are actually living it. A specific kind of loneliness is bred from being constantly surrounded by people while feeling remarkably far from home, and Beabadoobee gives that feeling a physical shape through the record's restless movement.
The album also opens a larger conversation about the realities artists can face while pursuing careers that are so often glamorized. Touring, performing, and staying constantly active can look like success from the outside, but internally it can mean exhaustion, isolation, and the strain of maintaining relationships from thousands of miles away. Pylon doesn't romanticize that contradiction. Instead, it allows the uglier parts of the experience to exist alongside the joy of making music.
Ultimately, Pylon is fun and refreshing while being equally excavating and gut-wrenchingly honest. It feels alive in the way it refuses to settle, constantly moving between tenderness and distortion, longing and anger, and connection and isolation. Even when Beabadoobee is writing about the distance between herself and the people she loves, the record itself becomes a form of connection.
A breath of fresh air heading into the fall, Pylon speaks not only to Beabadoobee's authenticity as an artist but also to the elevation of her craft. She isn't abandoning the softness that made her music so intimate in the first place. She pushes it until it cracks open, letting everything underneath come to the surface.
