beabadoobee's Pylon: A UK No. 1, Chino Moreno, and a Cell Tower at Madison Square Garden

beabadoobee's fourth album Pylon, released September 18, 2026 on Dirty Hit and Interscope, debuted at No. 1 on the UK Official Albums Chart, her second chart-topper in a row. It is her heaviest record yet, with Hayley Williams, Turnstile's Brendan Yates and Deftones' Chino Moreno on it, and it arrived two weeks before her first arena tour, the Powerlines Tour, opened October 1.

The arc is hard to miss. Beatrice Laus recorded “Coffee” in a friend's bedroom at 17, and a loop from it became Powfu's “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head),” a 2020 TikTok phenomenon that took three years to find its moment. Six years later she is climbing a steel tower on the floor of Madison Square Garden. Pylon is what that kid sounds like at 26.

What does Pylon sound like?

Louder than anything she has made. The 14-track record leans on grunge, Midwest emo and 1990s alt-rock, and the critics who have reviewed it agree on the turn.

“Pylon” has a much more grunge, Midwest emo, and 1990s radio rock-esque sound compared to its predecessors.Lucy An-Lee, The Harvard Crimson (4 stars)

Melodic Magazine's Ezra Kendrick heard “over-drived electric guitars and roaring drums” giving the album “its emotionally raw and sharp sound,” and concluded that “Pylon shows how much an artist can grow and change whilst still being truthful to the identity they have spent years crafting.” NME's four-star review landed on the same theme of growing up without pretending to have finished: “Beabadoobee doesn't have the answers to the anxieties that come with growing up, and she doesn't seem to need them.”

The guest list reads like a map of the music she grew into. Hayley Williams sings on “Nothing To Prove,” Brendan Yates on “Powerlines,” and Chino Moreno on the closer “Satellite,” which NME described as “exploding into a heavy, distorted alt-rock chorus.” Pinegrove's Evan Stephens Hall and Title Fight's Shane Moran contribute too, and Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975 produced “Write Me A Letter.” Her own framing, from the June announcement: “A lot of the songs on this record are things I wish I could have said to someone.”

Why did a TikTok-era artist top the chart with physical sales?

The most telling number is not the chart position but how she got there. Music Week's chart analysis put Pylon's opening week at 21,065 units, and almost all of it was something a fan could hold.

That is the quiet story of the bedroom-pop generation growing up. An artist whose breakout was a 15-second sample on a phone now has an audience that buys cassettes on release week, and that audience is big enough to fill arenas.

The algorithm found her. The fans who stayed wanted an object, a ticket and a room full of people singing back.

What happens on the Powerlines Tour?

Live Nation billed the run as her first arena tour and biggest to date. Wisp opens in the US, Canada and the UK, and Violet Grohl supports in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. At Madison Square Garden on October 5, mxdwn's Axel Rafferty described a stage built around a cell tower with powerlines strung across the arena; during “Powerlines” she climbed the tower and sang from the top. The review noted that “Bea's new album takes on a more punk energy, unlike the rest of her albums,” and that the set still made room for an acoustic “Coffee.” Opener Wisp, whose album If Not Winter we covered through its producer Stint, told the room she had dreamt of playing the Garden.

As of October 2026 the tour is still working through North America before the UK and European leg in November and December. For the full story of how she got here, from Iloilo City to the Eras Tour, see the beabadoobee wiki.