Beabadoobee - This Is How Tomorrow Moves

Ahead of laying down third album ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’, producer Rick Rubin instructed Beabadoobee – real name Beatrice Laus – to boil each track down to the bones of its simplest acoustic form. Where the comparatively naive indie-rock of 2020 debut ‘Fake It Flowers’ may have struggled to shine under such exposing conditions, two albums on Laus has become a songwriter of real nuance. Toes are dipped into smoky jazz bar shuffles on ‘Real Man’ and languid bossa nova on ‘A Cruel Affair’, but beneath the sonic outfit-changing, these are confident tracks full of melodic subtleties and a knack for using minimal ingredients to their fullest. ‘Coming Home’ dreams of domesticity via a simply-plucked Parisian guitar waltz, while the piano-led ‘Girl Song’ could almost be a teary Disney ballad. Unashamedly leaning into the tumults of youth, its vulnerability is genuinely touching: “In a way I’m figuring it out at my own pace / Just a girl who overthinks about proportions or her waist”. Then, there are more traditional forays back into fuzzy alt-rock (‘California’), and The 1975-adjacent pop-rock (‘Ever Seen’). Having recently completed a stint on Taylor’s Eras Tour, the continued ascent of Beabadoobee seems both assured and deserved.