When Beatrice Laus announced that her fourth album would be called Pylon, the title felt like a riddle. Named after the steel electricity towers she watched streak past from the window of a tour bus, the pylons became an unlikely tether to home, a lattice of metal and wire that connected her to the people she was leaving behind every night. It is a beautifully sideways image for an album that spends its running time working out what it means to be somewhere and nowhere at once.
From Hotel Rooms to Arena Stages
Written largely between shows and in hotel rooms during the tour for her 2024 UK number one album This Is How Tomorrow Moves, Pylon is an album forged in transit. The disconnection, the homesickness, the frustration of being physically present in one time zone while your head is somewhere else entirely, all of it finds its way into these 14 tracks. But rather than shrink into introspection, Laus has pushed everything outward. The record is louder, rawer, more ambitious than anything she has made before.
The guest list reads like a roll call of alternative royalty. Hayley Williams turns up on Nothing To Prove, lending that unmistakable Paramore firepower. Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates duets on Powerlines, his falsetto cutting through the distortion. Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno adds texture to the closing track Satellite. Pinegrove's Evan Stephens Hall and Title Fight guitarist Shane Moran contribute songwriting. Even The 1975's Matty Healy and George Daniel produce Write Me A Letter. It is a stacked roster, yet nobody steals the spotlight. They are there to bolster Laus's vision, not to redirect it.
Sweet Meets Sour
What makes Pylon compelling is not the heaviness itself but the way Laus refuses to let it flatten her songwriting. The album continually pivots between sweet and sour, sometimes within the same track. Write Me A Letter opens with a misty, chiming guitar figure before detonating into crunching, syncopated riffs. The disarmingly pretty Spark glows with melody even as the arrangements bristle underneath. Despite That lulls you into a dreamy bedroom-pop haze before sulphurous fuzz obliterates the mood.
The title track sets the template. A churning, string-laden arrangement builds around Laus's oblique metaphor about long-distance connection, then pulls the pin on a grenade of distortion that crackles loud enough to scratch your eardrums. Sun Has Set drives screamed vocals through riff-heavy guitars. Radio juices a sarcastic theme with a zigzagging guitar riff over thick fuzz. These are not experiments in noise for its own sake. They are deliberate, controlled detonations.
A Voice Finding Its Edge
Laus has said that making Pylon felt like the most herself she has ever felt in the studio. She told ELLE UK that rediscovering American Football and Mineral unlocked something. I was like, wait, hold on, I love this type of music. So I made an emo riff. The influence is audible, but Pylon is not a genre exercise. It sounds like someone who grew up on this music finally giving herself permission to let it bleed into her own.
Her voice has developed a pleasant, fluttery vibrato over the past couple of years, and at its best it soars over the distortion rather than competing with it. When she pushes harder, snarling on Sun Has Set or shouting amid gang vocals on In Motion, you can hear the effort. It actually makes those moments more interesting. This is someone stretching towards a sound rather than resting comfortably within one she has already mastered.
The Road Ahead
Pylon arrives alongside The Powerlines Tour, Laus's first arena headline run. Madison Square Garden, The O2, the Kia Forum. These are rooms that reward volume and conviction, and she has written an album that can fill them. There is a beauty in imperfection, she told RUSSH. I used to be scared, thinking, do I sound good in this song? But I am playing with a live band. This is live music.
That live energy courses through the record. The arrangements feel human rather than polished into place, guitars feeding back, drums pushing forward, vocals cracking at the edges. Pylon is not a departure so much as an arrival. After three albums of refining her bedroom-pop instincts, Laus has finally let the distortion do the talking. The pylons may connect her to home, but this record proves she is ready to stand on her own ground.