15.08.24

Beabadoobee is at a crossroads. On this ambitiously intricate third album, recorded with Rick Rubin in Malibu, the British Filipino is navigating the push and pull between fame and a desire to stay grounded

Beatrice Laus was still living with her parents when she wrote her breakout hit, Coffee, at 17 years old. Seven years and several releases later, the London-based guitarist and singer is paying her own mortgage. Viral success can be a double-edged sword for musicians just starting out – the level of TikTok fame Laus received for her earliest songs as Beabadoobee had the potential to swallow her whole. But it was clear from the start that Laus wasn’t going to follow the crowd: writing a song fangirling over Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus isn’t exactly a calculated play for global stardom. 

Over her first two records – 2020’s Fake It Flowers and 2022’s Beatopia – Beabadoobee’s music progressed from the overdriven guitars of 2000s teen movie soundtracks to the subdued sounds and fantastical imagery of mid-2000s coffee-shop rockers like Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae. Somewhere along the way, she stumbled into an intense fame she had previously only experienced from the periphery; she opened for Taylor Swift on a dozen dates of the recent, record-breaking Eras Tour. 

On her intricate and exhilarating new, third album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, Laus is in full command of her voice, tackling the messiness of maturing in the public eye with serpentine hooks and wry, wistful lyrics. 

Laus writes about life as if experiencing it in a fever dream, or perhaps through a thick cloud of pot smoke (on Ever Seen, a crush blossoms from a compliment she gets about her eyes while she’s the “highest I think I’ve ever been”). She builds narratives through flashes of exposition: an early morning walk gone wrong on Real Man comes to symbolise all the ways an old partner has failed her. 

Laus has often written lyrics with a loose association to reality – after all, she did name her previous album after a fictional kingdom she invented as a child – and on songs like A Cruel Affair and Tie My Shoes, she maps the anxieties of adulthood onto imaginary interrogations and invented memories. Many of the themes of her previous albums persist here, but the characters are further developed and their problems more complex. Lead single Take a Bite could be read as a response to 2022’s Talk: the latter’s demands for connection in a relationship are answered by the wisdom gained after a breakup. 

Revenge always seems to be on the tip of her tongue, too, like when her voice is carried by the buoyant lilt of a schoolyard taunt on One Time. But the pain is almost always self-inflicted: on Girl Song, Laus can barely stop scrutinising her own appearance, let alone pay any mind to the ways she might be hurting other people. 

This Is How Tomorrow Moves is also a bittersweet tour diary of an artist whose busy schedule isolates her from her partner (California) and makes her crave the simple responsibilities of chores (Coming Home). At the end of the tour, these songs suggest, Laus is still a “girl that wants to post a video about my cats,” as she recently confessed to Elle. 

This push and pull between stardom and the understated pleasures of a more private life are reflected in the album’s production. After recording and producing her first two albums mainly in London, Laus flew to Malibu this time; to work with production phenomenon Rick Rubin in his famed studio Shangri-La. 

Beaches, written about her experience recording in Malibu, recalls the fried guitar of California’s Red Hot Chili Peppers. Rubin’s influence seems to have pushed Laus towards a stripped-back, melody-focused mode. She described early meetings as “therapy sessions” and said that Rubin made her and her writing partner Jacob Bugden strip their demos for parts, and relearn them on acoustic guitar. 

The results sound at home next to her earliest recordings. She’s feather-light and profound on the piano-driven Girl Song and the twangy Everything I Want. Her confidence and bravado of Take a Bite comes through in layered reverberating guitars; the bossa nova beat on A Cruel Affair echoes the forbidden flirtations in its lyrics. “Writing cause I’m healing, never writing songs to hurt you,” Laus confesses with a sigh, suggesting that she knows interpretation is out of her hands once she releases her album. At that moment, though, she’ll still be a 24-year-old girl, sitting with her cats and listening to Elliott Smith. 

Arielle Gordon