Pylon begins quietly. “It’s pouring in a place where I do not know the name,” beabadoobee sings over an acoustic guitar on the album’s title track, her voice soft enough to feel almost like a lullaby. It’s an understated opening for a record that will soon become considerably louder, but it establishes the emotional territory of Pylon: unfamiliar places, changing relationships, nostalgia and the uncomfortable process of trying to understand yourself while everything around you moves. Named after the structures that carry power lines, mark boundaries and support bridges, the artist’s new LP feels similarly preoccupied with what holds us together and what happens when those structures begin to shift.
Throughout the album, beabadoobee, born Beatrice Laus, moves between the sweetness and distortion that have become central to her sound. Sun Has Set brings back the sharpness of teenage angst, its electric guitars accompanying the blunt finality of “fuck that, you can never run back to me now.” Yet the anger is rarely uncomplicated. “When I say we’ll never be friends, I mean we’ll never pretend” is perhaps one of the record’s most revealing lines: less interested in dramatic revenge than in rejecting the socially acceptable performance of pretending everything is fine. Switchblade continues this tension, asking whether to “start the fight or take the flight” while capturing the exhaustion that comes when strong emotions begin to feel impossible to control.
That sense of emotional contradiction becomes Pylon’s defining quality. On Write Me A Letter, her voice remains characteristically melodic and tender as she admits vulnerability with an almost disarming directness. The song’s references to reading the news without knowing how to process it place intensely personal feelings against the wider confusion of contemporary life. Elsewhere, It’s Alright sounds initially like another burst of electric angst, before gradually revealing itself as a song about letting go: “I’ll take my time and it’s alright.” Rather than resolving its emotions, Pylon allows them to coexist.
The album becomes particularly compelling when Beatrice stops simply inhabiting those feelings and begins observing them. In Motion feels suspended between movement and paralysis, its smooth instrumentation carrying the admission “the weight is too heavy, feel like I’m falling.” Her insistence that “I don’t have to second-guess my truth” marks a subtle shift from reacting to experience towards understanding it. By the time Radio arrives, the emotional aftermath of a relationship seems less like a single event than a series of stages: nostalgia, anger, wounded pride, comfort and, eventually, the possibility of being okay. “Not going to call you out this time” sounds less like surrender than a refusal to remain consumed by the past.
If Pylon is an album about growing up, however, it doesn’t pretend that growing up means leaving everything behind. Powerlines, featuring Brendan Yates, is brief but atmospheric, its melancholic vocals creating the feeling of being alone somewhere after dark. “Despite it all I only want the best of you” captures the album’s emotional maturity particularly well: love does not have to disappear simply because a relationship has changed. Despite That develops this idea further, placing emotional separation against the changing seasons. “Weather changed by September, but I can’t wait till I get home” evokes the strange mismatch that comes with growing older: people move, lives diverge, and yet affection can survive the distance.
There are moments when Pylon feels less revelatory. Nothing To Prove circles its central idea without quite reaching the emotional depth of its strongest songs. But even these quieter moments contribute to an album that is more interested in emotional accumulation than dramatic resolution. Spark, with its melodic warmth and whispered vocals, offers a small but significant glimpse of hope: “It’s nothing much, but it’s a start.” By the closing Satellite, Beatrice sounds restless again, beginning almost hesitantly before her voice gathers strength. The album ends not with a definitive answer, but with the feeling of someone still looking backwards while learning how to move forwards.
beabadoobee has grown from the teenager writing songs alone in her bedroom into an artist capable of filling arenas, yet the emotional vocabulary of that teenager has never entirely disappeared. Instead of abandoning it, she has learned how to interrogate it. Pylon is angry, romantic, nostalgic and uncertain in equal measure: a record about discovering that growing up does not necessarily mean becoming less emotional, but becoming better at sitting with what you feel.
