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At the ripe age of 23, Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, better known as the artist beabadoobee, thought she was done growing up. She had just finished her third album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, which became her first number-one album in the UK. It was the following year, while on a relatively peaceful tour through Europe and North America, that Laus realized she was perhaps getting too much time to think.
Cue the full weight of a classic quarter-life crashout. Laus has since emerged on the other side older and, if not necessarily wiser, then definitely more accepting of life's inescapable chaos. In our fall issue cover story, Laus opens up to writer Olive Pometsey about her personal journey over the past two years — which she captures in her new album, Pylon (out today), itself a return to the "Rockabadoobee" sounds of her youth.
In a wildly candid conversation, Laus talks about the FOMO she experienced over the relative normalcy of her friends' lives, the anxiety she feels over the album's clouted lineup (including Hayley Williams, Turnstile's Brendan Yates, and Pinegrove's Evan Stephens Hall), and the strangeness of reconciling all the younger versions of herself. It's hard work tending to your own psyche and staying open to things, but Laus seems to have made peace with the way she moves through the world, and vice-versa.
Case in point: In an anecdote that got left on the cutting room floor, Laus reminisced about a recent night spent rolling a spliff and going down to the canal at 2 a.m. on a weekend. "This one guy came up to me, and he asked for Rizzler, and I was like, 'God, he's gonna like start having a conversation with me,'" Laus says. "All he did was sit next to me, smoke a spliff, didn't ask any questions, ask my name, but kind of sat there and made sure no one would bother me, got on his bike, and left. He was like, 'Have a safe night.' What a fucking legend. Good men exist. Period."
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