Beabadoobee's Fourth Album Pylon Turns Rock Rage Sweet

Beabadoobee has released her fourth album, Pylon, on the label Dirty Hit. The record sprinkles 1990s alt-rock fuzz with disarmingly sweet melodies and features an impressive roster of guests, including Paramore's Hayley Williams and Turnstile's Brendan Yates.

The Guardian's review frames the album against a broader argument about the demise of the monoculture, a theory the paper advanced in a feature last month. Streaming services, personalised algorithms and the declining influence of radio and television, the paper suggested, have produced a world where stardom is no longer as universal as it once was.

The Guardian's test case was the Sam Fender and Olivia Dean single "Rein Me In," which spent a record-breaking 23 weeks at No 1 yet never attained anything like the ubiquity a chart-topping song once guaranteed. To judge by social media, the paper noted, plenty of people seemed never to have knowingly heard it.

Few careers advance that theory better, the review argues, than that of Beatrice Laus, the 26-year-old British-Filipino singer-songwriter better known as Beabadoobee. To a certain cohort — primarily female, in their late teens and early 20s — she is not just a huge star but a genuinely iconic figure. The review concedes that "iconic" is an over-used adjective in 2026, but sets out evidence that the label fits: social media abounds with tutorials advising female fans how to copy her style and imitate her makeup, and she can be personally held partly responsible for the 2021 outbreak of adolescent girls drawing fake freckles on their faces in imitation of her own.

The album itself appears to register that unease. On "Satellite," the closing track of Pylon, Laus sings: "I give the generation a new infatuation. If only I knew how to cope with the times." The line, quoted verbatim in the Guardian's review, suggests the burdens of that influence sit awkwardly with the songwriter, even as she names it outright.

The review's headline calls Pylon a "surprisingly relatable rampage through rock star rage" — a record in which the voice of a generation channels fury through 90s alt-rock textures rather than pop polish. Williams, the Paramore frontwoman, and Yates, Turnstile's vocalist, give the album direct lineage to two of the most consequential acts in American alt-rock and hardcore of the past two decades.

Pylon arrives as Beabadoobee's fourth album, released on Dirty Hit, the London independent label that has housed her career. The record positions Laus, who was born in the Philippines and raised in London, at a curious intersection: an artist with demonstrable generational influence — the fake-freckle phenomenon of 2021 is the review's cited proof — whose fame remains, by the Guardian's monoculture argument, invisible to large parts of the population.

The full review, published by the Guardian on 17 September, treats that paradox as the album's context rather than its weakness. Whether Pylon can translate a devoted cohort's devotion into the broader recognition that chart ubiquity once delivered will test the paper's thesis about stardom in the streaming era.