Beabamania

The day before the final show of the North American leg of her Powerlines Tour, British singer-songwriter Beatrice Laus, better known by her stage name beabadoobee, put out a request to her fans on social media: “HALLOWEEN SHOW last show of US tour in seattle tmrw dress up 😋” 

And dress up they did: Harlequin clowns, fuzzy Garfields, and shivering angels lined up in the autumn evening chill outside Climate Pledge Arena. The fanbase skewed young. Everywhere you looked, an army of beabawannabes posed for photos in furry boots, short shorts, camo, military caps, and cargo pants in an attempt to imitate their idol.

The night started off strong with a set from San Francisco-based “nu-gaze” musician Natalie R. Lu, aka Wisp, who rose to TikTok fame in April 2023 with her viral single “Your Face,” which she recorded using a pair of Apple earbuds with no prior music production experience. Her band walked out to the Phantom of the Opera theme. “I’m not going to lie, I’m really feeling myself in this costume,” Lu said, in a goth Little Red Riding Hood ensemble complete with a fur-trimmed crimson velvet cloak, satin corset mini dress, and black boots. She sang into a mic adorned with a raven atop a stand festooned with spiders and cobwebs, while her band performed dressed as Stan and Kenny from South Park, a zombie, and a duck.

Wisp is a fitting name for the project: Lu’s ethereal, evanescent soundscapes and whispery vocals reminded me of the icy glitter of a frozen tundra. Her wistful, haunting walls of sound wrapped the dark venue as plumes of fake fog billowed from the stage. Between songs, she took bites of a croissant. “This has become one of my favorite songs to perform on this tour,” Lu said before launching into the soft acoustic guitar track “All i need.” The crowd erupted into cheers when she brought out her famous black Hello Kitty guitar. She ended with “Your Face,” pointing into the crowd at a fan as she delivered the line “I see your face.”

Before beabadoobee’s set, anticipation crackled through the arena as the sound of buzzing powerlines played over speakers. The set evoked a deserted highway, complete with a pylon, glowing powerlines, a streetlight, a divider, yellow painted lines, reflective pavement markers, and tufts of grass sprouting from rocky terrain. Beabadoobee wrote her fourth studio album Pylon while touring for her 2024 album This Is How Tomorrow Moves. The album gets its title from the pylon towers and powerlines she’d gaze  out the window while homesick, a symbol of isolation and connection at the same time: “At least we’re connected / like a pylon on the open road.”

At last, beabadoobee and her band took the stage in skeleton costumes and ghoulish black face paint scars—Laus paired hers with baggy black cargo pants and combat boots. They opened with “Sun Has Set,” a punchy, blistering track: “When I say, ‘We’ll never be friends’ / I mean, we’ll never pretend / Fuck that, you can never run back to me now.” 

Before playing the Pylon title track, Laus explained that she wrote the album about how much she was struggling on the 2024 tour and how she’d never imagined she would “play venues of this size.” “I did this as a joke,” she said, “and now it’s my life, and I wouldn’t do anything else.” She got her start in 2017, when she released her music under the name she had invented for a finsta account, and it stuck.

Laus sang the lyrics, “And I love you / It’s pouring in a place that I don’t know the name / But you’re always worth the wait” with bruised longing. Her sinuous voice had the ability to simultaneously convey heartache, infatuation, rage, loneliness, and pining, recalling Dolores O’Riordan with its potency and purity of emotion. Chugging, fuzzed-out guitars evoked the sensation of flying down a highway while staring out the window, building to a high-voltage crescendo as the powerlines flashed. I thought of Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman,” another song about urgent yearning and electricity: “I hear you singin’ in the wire / I can hear you through the whine / And the Wichita lineman / Is still on the line.”

Moments of levity broke up all that melancholy. On the song “Take a Bite” (produced by hitmaker Rick Rubin and beabadoobee guitarist Jacob Bugden for This Is How Tomorrow Moves), she exuded daring, defiance, and playfulness, bouncing around the stage and grinning. The crowd jumped up and down to the “la la la” chorus of the upbeat, cathartic “Nothing to Prove,” written in collaboration with Hayley Williams. 

The September release of Pylon marked the adoption of an edgier, grungier new sound for beabadoobee, incorporating ’90s alt, radio rock, and Midwest emo influences and enlisting Williams, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates as collaborators. Laus picked up a pink guitar and screamed, “I fucking love this song!” before launching into “Switchblade,” which channeled “Seether” by Veruca Salt, one of her favorite bands.

By contrast, some of beabadoobee’s earlier, more well-known songs felt almost incongruous with the grittier new material. Laus was inspired to write music after hearing Kimya Dawson’s songs on the Juno soundtrack, and that twee sweetness shines through in her older work. The audience squealed, swayed, and sang along to her hit debut single “Coffee,” which went viral on YouTube in 2017 and blew up even more after it was sampled on Canadian rapper ​​Powfu’s TikTok-popular 2019 song “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head).” A group of teens behind me screeched at eardrum-splitting decibels the entire time, like they were front row at a Beatles concert during peak Beatlemania.

Though Laus expressed nothing but gratitude for her fans and played many of the songs that helped introduce them to her, I couldn’t help but wonder if she resents the staggering popularity of “Coffee” and the pressure to conform to her poppier earlier style. “I’m not going to lie, it was overwhelming… I kinda hated it. I hated more people knowing about the first song I’d ever written and not my others. I was so stubborn but I grew into it and accepted that’s just how life works. I was extremely grateful for its existence and it’s only given me more opportunities,” she told The Basement in 2020.

Nevertheless, like Pylon itself, the dynamic show nailed the bittersweet balance between nostalgia and angst. Songs like “Radio,” “Pictures of Us,” and the unreleased acoustic song “The Road,” which recalled Simon & Garfunkel, captured the driftless sense of an endless road trip against a backdrop with visuals of powerlines draped across a sky and trucks zooming along the highway. For the track “Powerlines,” Lau climbed the pylon onstage and performed while perched on it, and during “Satellite,” she picked up an old-school corded phone mounted on the set’s streetlamp and sang into the receiver: “Hold my breath until the dial tone / Ring, ring, ring to bring you back to me.”

At times, I picked up snatches of post-Britpop and garage rock influences á la the Strokes (Laus is heavily inspired by the band and covered their song “The Adults Are Talking” in 2022). I could feel the DNA of the music I grew up with embedded in her songs. An unbearable nostalgia for something I couldn’t quite name—for an earlier time that I can never return to and wouldn’t if I could, full of agony and bliss—made my chest ache. And for just a moment, amid all the screaming teens pogoing in Halloween costumes, I felt like I was there again.

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