Beabadoobee (stylized in lowercase, pronounced "bee-bə-DOO-bee") is the stage name of Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, a Filipino-British singer-songwriter born June 3, 2000, in Iloilo City, in the Western Visayas region of the Philippines, and raised in West London since age three. Signed to the independent label Dirty Hit at 18 after a self-recorded 2017 bedroom track called "Coffee" was resurrected three years later inside a Canadian rapper's viral sample, she has released three studio albums, Fake It Flowers (2020), Beatopia (2022) and the Rick Rubin-produced, UK chart-topping This Is How Tomorrow Moves (2024), opened twelve U.S. stadium shows on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, and is set to release her fourth album, Pylon, in September 2026 through Dirty Hit and Interscope Records ahead of her first headlining arena tour.
Beabadoobee moved with her parents from the Philippines to the United Kingdom at age three and was raised in West London. Her household was a collision of two musical worlds: her father filled it with Original Pilipino Music, while her mother introduced her to 1990s alternative and pop-rock acts, Alanis Morissette, the Cranberries and Suzanne Vega among them, an influence she credits directly with shaping her musical identity. She has said she can understand, though not fluently speak, Hiligaynon and Tagalog, the languages of her birth region and the Philippines more broadly.
She attended Sacred Heart High School, an all-girls Catholic school in Hammersmith, before completing her final year of secondary education at Hammersmith Academy. As one of few Filipina students in a predominantly white institution, she has described experiencing racism, financial strain, and the general stress of an immigrant household, factors she says contributed to poor grades and what she has called "misfit behavior." At 17, she was expelled from school.
It was in the aftermath of that expulsion that music entered her life in earnest. She had already spent seven years studying classical violin, but it was her father who, seeing her "really bored" and without direction, bought her a second-hand guitar and told her to "play this, this will make you happy," as she recalled to DIY. She taught herself to play by watching YouTube tutorials, learning Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me" as one of her first covers before writing her debut original composition, "Coffee." She has cited Kimya Dawson and the Juno film soundtrack as a direct catalyst for wanting to make her own music.
The stage name itself has a mundane origin. "Beabadoobee" was a handle she invented for a private "finsta" simply because no other username was available. When her friend and early producer, Oscar Lang, prepared to upload "Coffee" and told her she needed an artist name, she offered the joke handle, and it stuck.
In September 2017, at age 17, Beabadoobee wrote and recorded "Coffee," her first-ever composition on guitar, in a friend's bedroom, and it was uploaded quietly to YouTube and Spotify. The hushed, lo-fi acoustic track slowly accumulated plays and caught the attention of the independent label Dirty Hit, which signed her in mid-2018 when she was still only 18.
"Coffee" would likely have remained a modest indie favorite were it not for a chance discovery two years later. In 2019, Canadian rapper Powfu (born Isaiah Faber) was browsing SoundCloud for sample material and found a producer's edit built around the drum-and-guitar loop from "Coffee." Powfu built a new song over that sample, "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)," a melancholic lo-fi hip-hop track about a man confessing his love to a partner on his deathbed, an idea he has said was partly inspired by his habit of watching Nicholas Sparks films. Beabadoobee was credited as a featured artist on the release.
Released in February 2020 after a delayed sample-clearance process, "Death Bed" exploded on TikTok, generating hundreds of millions of video creations built around its hook. The song racked up roughly 4 billion TikTok plays in March 2020 alone, its official YouTube video passed 825 million views, and its Spotify streams have climbed past 1.9 to 2 billion, with the South China Morning Post citing total streams exceeding 1.7 billion on Spotify alone as of 2025. On the Billboard Hot 100 the single peaked at number 23, crediting Powfu as lead artist with Beabadoobee featured, and on the UK Official Singles Chart it reached number 4 in February 2020.
The virality transformed her trajectory almost overnight. Before the song's release she was a promising but under-the-radar Dirty Hit signee with a handful of EPs; afterward she was fielding international press, shortlisted for the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll, and preparing her proper full-length debut. Notably, "Coffee" predates the viral moment by three years, meaning her breakout was less manufactured TikTok stardom and more a case of a years-old bedroom recording being resurrected by someone else's remix, a distinction both she and critics have pointed to when discussing her authenticity relative to typical "TikTok artist" narratives.
Before her debut album, Beabadoobee released a run of EPs on Dirty Hit that built her cult following: Lice (2018), Patched Up (2018), Loveworm (2019), Space Cadet (2019), and Our Extended Play (2021). These records established her as part of the same Dirty Hit lineage as Wolf Alice, Pale Waves and No Rome.
Her debut studio album, Fake It Flowers, was released October 16, 2020, via Dirty Hit. It debuted at number 8 on the UK Albums Chart. Billboard named her the Top New Rock Artist of 2020 based on U.S. sales data, and she was one of Apple Music's "Up Next" artists that November. Critically, the album was very well received, with The Guardian calling it "shiny, vulnerable retro pop" and praising her handling of themes like self-harm on tracks such as "Dye It Red." Rolling Stone favorably compared it to 1990s alt-rock touchstones like Veruca Salt and That Dog, highlighting the Hole-inspired vocal on "Charlie Brown." The Independent coined the term "bubblegrunge" to describe the record's aesthetic. Beabadoobee has said the album was about "blaming everyone around me for the person I am today," reflecting a period of unresolved anger about her childhood and past relationships.
Her second studio album, Beatopia, arrived July 15, 2022, via Dirty Hit, and marked a significant artistic leap, debuting at number 4 on the UK Albums Chart, her best placement to that point. The title and conceptual anchor come from an imaginary world Beabadoobee invented at age seven, complete with its own alphabet, countries and cities, as an escape from a difficult, dislocating childhood shortly after her family's move to London. A primary-school teacher discovered her hand-drawn "Beatopia" poster and pinned it up for the class to mock, a formative embarrassment that led her to suppress the concept for over a decade before revisiting and reclaiming it as an adult during the pandemic. As she told Rolling Stone UK, "Everyone has a Beatopia inside them," reframing the record as a metaphor for self-acceptance rather than a literal concept album. The album produced the hit single "The Perfect Pair," certified Gold by the RIAA. Reviews were generally favorable: NME praised it as a record where "the seeds that were planted in Fake It Flowers not only blossom, but inhabit an entirely different world"; The Line of Best Fit scored it 8/10, calling it her "unapologetic leap into mega viability." Some reviews were more mixed, with The Telegraph arguing the sound was "rehashed, scrubbed-up 1990s alt-rock" and The Guardian noting the lyrics could feel "rather generic."
Her third studio album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, was released August 9, 2024, via Dirty Hit, produced primarily by Rick Rubin at his Malibu studio, Shangri-La, alongside co-producer Jacob Bugden. The album became a landmark achievement: it debuted at number 1 on the UK Albums Chart, the Scottish Albums Chart and the UK Independent Albums Chart, her first-ever UK number-one album, moving on the strength of 17,202 chart units in its first week across CDs, vinyl, cassettes, downloads and streaming-equivalent units. It also topped the UK's Record Store and Vinyl Albums charts that week. Critically the record was very well received. Rolling Stone praised Rubin's "attentive production style," saying the album "ventures into new territory but makes it feel worn-in." NPR highlighted it as an album where Beabadoobee "finds her footing" under Rubin's guidance. The Guardian's Kitty Empire described the track "Post" as running "a Taylor Swift-ish pop song" through a "zoomergaze" filter. Notable tracks include "Beaches," an "epic, self-assured rock track" about the peace she found recording in Malibu, and "Real Man," a Fiona Apple-indebted, piano-driven takedown of "disappointing men," co-written with her boyfriend, later issued as the album's fifth single.
In June 2026, Beabadoobee announced her fourth studio album, Pylon, set for release September 18, 2026, via Dirty Hit and Interscope Records, marking her first release under a major-label partnership alongside her longtime indie home. The 14-track album is named after the electricity pylons that line highways worldwide and is described as a "harsher, more direct" sonic pivot, drawing on classic grunge, Midwest emo and 1990s radio rock, with themes of isolation, distance and emotional instability shaped by extensive touring. The lead single, "Sun Has Set," was released alongside the announcement, with an accompanying music video directed by her partner, filmmaker Jake Erland.
Beabadoobee's core artistic signature is a self-aware, deeply referential channeling of 1990s alternative and indie rock, filtered through Gen Z sensibilities and bedroom-pop production roots. Her early work was pure bedroom pop and lo-fi acoustic indie folk, sparse, intimate, DIY, but by Fake It Flowers she had shifted decisively toward fuzzy, distorted guitar rock explicitly modeled on 1990s alt-rock and grunge.
Her self-cited influences read like a syllabus of that era and adjacent lineages: Alex G, Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Florist, Elliott Smith, the Cranberries, Alanis Morissette, Suzanne Vega and Sixpence None the Richer. Critics have consistently drawn comparisons to Hole, Veruca Salt, That Dog and My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze distortion. The Guardian's review of This Is How Tomorrow Moves coined the term "zoomergaze" for her particular fusion of shoegaze textures with contemporary pop songwriting, framed by Kitty Empire as "the latest iteration of My Bloody Valentine's influence as refracted by the internet."
The Independent's "bubblegrunge" label captures the tension at the heart of her music: sugary, hook-driven pop melodies layered atop the sonic vocabulary of grunge and 90s alt-rock, loud fuzzy guitars, slacker-rock cadences and dream-pop atmospherics. Her genre tags span indie rock, indie pop, folk-pop, bedroom pop, slacker rock and space rock, reflecting how fluidly she has moved between hushed acoustic balladry and full-throttle guitar rock across her catalogue. With Pylon, she is reportedly pushing further into "harsher" territory, grunge, Midwest emo and 90s radio rock, suggesting a fourth-album pivot toward heavier, more direct guitar music after the polished pop-rock of the Rubin album. Critics have occasionally pushed back on the revivalist framing, with The Telegraph arguing her sound is executed so faithfully it resembles "a fictional artist dreamed up to soundtrack a teen movie," though this fidelity is arguably also the source of her commercial and critical durability: she has built a career translating a specific 90s alt-rock and shoegaze grammar for a streaming-native, TikTok-literate generation that largely did not live through the era she channels.
Beabadoobee's chart trajectory shows a clean, consistent upward climb across three studio albums, moving from a number 8 UK debut with Fake It Flowers in 2020 to number 4 with Beatopia in 2022 to a first-ever number 1 with This Is How Tomorrow Moves in 2024. That third album also reached number 34 on the U.S. Billboard 200, number 1 on the UK Independent Albums and Scottish Albums charts, number 6 on the ARIA chart in Australia, number 10 on the US Top Rock and Alternative Albums chart and number 6 on the US Independent Albums chart. It became her first UK number-one album, debuting on top the week of August 16, 2024, and made her, per Music Week's chart analysis, the eighth female solo artist to achieve a UK number-one album that year.
On the singles side, her breakout moment via "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)" charted at number 4 on the UK Singles Chart and number 23 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in early 2020, credited to Powfu as lead artist with Beabadoobee featured. Her own single "The Perfect Pair," from Beatopia, was RIAA-certified Gold in the United States. As of 2025, cumulative streaming figures across her catalogue, helped enormously by "Death Bed," were estimated to exceed 5 billion, with the South China Morning Post citing over 25.5 million monthly Spotify listeners.
Beabadoobee has also collected industry recognition beyond raw chart numbers. She was shortlisted for the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll and received a nomination for the Rising Star Award at the 2020 Brit Awards, as well as a Radar Award nomination at the NME Awards that year. Five years later she returned to the Brit Awards with two nominations in the top tier of British categories, Artist of the Year and British Rock/Alternative Act, at the 2025 ceremony, though she did not win either; Charli XCX took Artist of the Year and Sam Fender won British Rock/Alternative Act.
Beabadoobee's live career has been defined by an unusually prestigious run of major supporting slots. She served as a support act for Dirty Hit labelmates The 1975 on legs of their Music for Cars tour in 2020, toured with Clairo on her Immunity tour, and later opened for Olivia Rodrigo's Guts World Tour.
Her highest-profile support role came in 2023, when Taylor Swift personally selected her as an opening act for the U.S. leg of The Eras Tour. Beabadoobee opened twelve shows between March 24 and April 30, 2023, across stadiums in Las Vegas, Arlington, Tampa, Houston and Atlanta, with a setlist including "10:36," "Apple Cider," "Care," "She Plays Bass," "See You Soon," "The Perfect Pair," "Glue Song," "Talk" and "Cologne." The run produced one of the tour's most talked-about fan moments: on her first night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Swift performed "Our Song" as a surprise acoustic-set song dedicated to Beabadoobee, having read in an interview that it was the song she wanted to hear. Beabadoobee has described being a Swift fan since childhood, saying "She was my Nokia ringtone," and has said Swift's songwriting, especially her use of bridges, directly influenced her own writing on This Is How Tomorrow Moves. She has also spoken candidly about the terror of performing to stadium-sized crowds, describing herself as "literally clenching my butt cheeks for the entire 30 minutes" she was onstage each night, and noting the sheer scale of the audience made faces blur into "a massive 2D print of a crowd," as she told The Guardian. She later withdrew from a planned 2023 European headline tour after announcing an unspecified illness, having previously toured Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark that spring.
Beyond the Eras Tour, she has built a strong festival profile: she opened for Sabrina Carpenter, alongside Clairo, at London's BST Hyde Park in July 2025, and has played major festivals including Lollapalooza, All Points East, Reading and Leeds, and the 2025 Bonnaroo lineup. She has also opened for Halsey. Her Lollapalooza appearances place her on the same festival circuit as Christian Gates, who has also played Lollapalooza; the two acts have appeared on the same festival's lineup, a documented overlap on the touring circuit rather than a direct creative collaboration.
Looking ahead, her Powerlines Tour, announced in June 2026 alongside Pylon, is her first-ever headlining arena run, spanning North America, the UK and Europe from October through December 2026, with stops including Madison Square Garden in New York, the Kia Forum in Los Angeles and The O2 in London, and support acts Wisp and Violet Grohl, daughter of Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, on select dates. It marks a significant scale jump from her prior status as a support act to a genuine headline arena draw.
The single most significant production collaboration of Beabadoobee's career to date is with Rick Rubin, who produced This Is How Tomorrow Moves at his Malibu studio, Shangri-La, alongside co-producer Jacob Bugden. According to Beabadoobee, Rubin had been pursuing a collaboration with her for some time before she felt ready, and their first meeting felt "like a therapy session"; after hearing her demos he committed to the project within a week. Rubin's methodology was hands-off and emotion-first: he had her relearn every song acoustically so she could compare the raw songwriting foundation against her more produced vision, a process she has credited with substantially boosting her confidence as a musician. In one memorable studio anecdote, just before she played Rubin her songs for the first time, he asked her to "meet my friend," who turned out to be Nick Cave. The partnership yielded her first UK number-one album and was widely credited, including by NPR, with elevating her songwriting and production polish without sacrificing her identity.
As a Dirty Hit labelmate of The 1975, Beabadoobee has a long-running creative relationship with the band's Matty Healy and George Daniel. In June 2021, Healy and Daniel co-produced her EP Our Extended Play in its entirety, reportedly written together "in the countryside," including the co-written single "Last Day on Earth." Daniel later co-produced her collaboration with PinkPantheress, "Tinkerbell Is Overrated," which appeared on Beatopia and helped push that album to number 4 on the UK chart. Beabadoobee has spoken publicly about how The 1975 "taught me how to cope with fame" in the earliest days of her career.
Beabadoobee has recorded with a broad cross-section of the 2020s alt-pop and indie scene, including Laufey, Clairo, Cavetown, PinkPantheress and Luna Li. Her 2022 feature on Cavetown's "Fall in Love with a Girl" paired the two Dirty Hit-adjacent artists on a queer love song, with Beabadoobee appearing as an on-screen love interest in the music video. Her Beatopia album artwork and a shared tattoo were the product of a close creative partnership with producer and co-writer Jacob Bugden and tattoo artist Shabalaparabala.
Beabadoobee has been signed to Dirty Hit, the independent British label directed by Jamie Oborne, also the longtime manager of The 1975, since 2018, when she was just 18. Dirty Hit's roster over the years has also included Wolf Alice, Pale Waves and No Rome, situating Beabadoobee within a small, tightly-knit indie-label ecosystem that has repeatedly cross-pollinated collaborators, producers and tour slots. Oborne has said he was "struck by how pure and unaffected her desire to be an artist was" upon first meeting her. She has publicly described her relationship with the label as "respectful and lovely," crediting them with supporting her "since the beginning" of her career.
With the 2026 announcement of Pylon, her label arrangement expanded: the album will be released via Dirty Hit and Interscope Records, marking her first major-label co-release as she pivots to headlining arenas. On the visuals side, her partner Jake Erland, a director and cinematographer, has become a key creative collaborator, directing music videos including the one for "Sun Has Set."
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2000 | Born Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, June 3, in Iloilo City, Philippines. |
| 2017 | Writes and records "Coffee," her first original song, at 17, shortly after being expelled from school. |
| 2018 | Signed by Dirty Hit at age 18; releases EPs Lice and Patched Up. |
| 2019 | Releases EPs Loveworm and Space Cadet; Powfu discovers a sample of "Coffee." |
| 2020 | "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)" goes viral on TikTok; debut album Fake It Flowers released October 16, debuts at No. 8 in the UK; named Billboard's Top New Rock Artist of 2020. |
| 2021 | Releases EP Our Extended Play, produced with Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975. |
| 2022 | Second album Beatopia released July 15, debuts at No. 4 in the UK; "The Perfect Pair" is certified Gold by the RIAA. |
| 2023 | Opens twelve U.S. stadium shows on Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, March 24 to April 30. |
| 2024 | Third album This Is How Tomorrow Moves, produced by Rick Rubin, released August 9; debuts at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart, her first UK chart-topper. |
| 2025 | Nominated for Artist of the Year and British Rock/Alternative Act at the Brit Awards; opens for Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park; plays Bonnaroo. |
| 2026 | Announces fourth album Pylon (Dirty Hit/Interscope, out September 18) and The Powerlines Tour, her first headlining arena run, running October to December. |
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)" TikTok plays (March 2020) | Approx. 4 billion |
| "Death Bed" official YouTube video views | Over 825 million |
| "Death Bed" Spotify streams (as of 2025) | Over 1.7 billion |
| "The Perfect Pair" RIAA certification | Gold |
| This Is How Tomorrow Moves first-week UK chart units | 17,202 units |
| Monthly Spotify listeners (as of 2025) | Over 25.5 million |
| Total catalogue streams (as of 2025) | Estimated over 5 billion |
It began as a joke username for a private "finsta" account, chosen simply because no other handle was available. When her friend and early producer Oscar Lang was preparing to upload her song "Coffee" and told her she needed an artist name, she offered the joke handle, and it stuck.
"Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)" is a 2020 song by Canadian rapper Powfu that samples the drum-and-guitar loop from Beabadoobee's 2017 song "Coffee." She is credited as a featured artist. The song went viral on TikTok in 2020, reaching roughly 4 billion video plays that March and peaking at number 4 on the UK Singles Chart and number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100, under Powfu as lead artist.
Beatopia is both the title of her 2022 second album and an imaginary world she invented at age seven, complete with its own alphabet, countries and cities, as a coping mechanism after her family's move to London. A childhood incident in which a teacher mocked her hand-drawn Beatopia poster led her to suppress the idea for over a decade before reclaiming it as an adult during the pandemic.
Rubin had been pursuing a collaboration with Beabadoobee for some time before she felt ready. Their first meeting felt "like a therapy session," and after hearing her demos he committed within a week. He produced the album at his Malibu studio, Shangri-La, with co-producer Jacob Bugden, using a hands-off, emotion-first method that had her relearn every song acoustically.
Yes. Taylor Swift personally selected Beabadoobee to open twelve U.S. stadium shows on The Eras Tour between March 24 and April 30, 2023. On the opening night at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Swift surprised her by performing "Our Song" during the acoustic set specifically because she had read Beabadoobee wanted to hear it.
Yes. Beabadoobee has played Lollapalooza as part of her festival circuit, and Christian Gates has also appeared at Lollapalooza; the two acts have appeared on the same festival lineup, though no joint set or direct collaboration between them has been documented.
Beabadoobee's story runs largely on its own track: a bedroom recording resurrected by a stranger's sample, three albums that trace a path from lo-fi to a UK number one with Rick Rubin, and a jump from stadium support slots to her first headline arena tour behind Pylon. Her documented overlap with the broader Los Angeles and touring-circuit ecosystem covered on this wiki is limited to a shared Lollapalooza lineup with Christian Gates, a festival-circuit fact rather than a creative partnership. Readers interested in adjacent Dirty Hit and 1975-orbit artists, or in the wider Gen Z alt-rock and bedroom-pop revival Beabadoobee helped popularize, may find useful context across other artist pages on this wiki.