Beabadoobee debuted the stripped-back title track of her album ‘Pylon’ at Red Rocks, ahead of its September release
Beabadoobee gave her most devoted fans a first, unvarnished look at what comes next, and she did it with an apology in advance. On Friday (Aug. 7), the singer-songwriter debuted the title track of her upcoming album Pylon for the first time at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, playing it solo on acoustic guitar during her encore. “I’m really sorry if I fuck it up,” she told the crowd. “This is the first time I’m ever playing it.” The moment was tender and slightly nervy, exactly the kind of low-stakes intimacy that a stripped-back debut invites.
The Red Rocks show capped a short run of US dates and served as a preview of a carefully staged new era. Pylon, out September 18 via Dirty Hit and Interscope, is Beabadoobee’s fourth studio album and the follow-up to 2024’s acclaimed This Is How Tomorrow Moves, which NME awarded four stars, calling it “a poignant, powerful thing.” Four tracks from the new record made the setlist, including the two singles released so far, the grungy “Sun Has Set” and “Switchblade,” plus “Memories,” an unreleased song making its fourth Red Rocks appearance that arrives August 20.
A Quiet Debut for a Loud Era
There is something telling about unveiling the title track in its most naked form. Where much of the Pylon rollout has leaned into distortion and volume, the acoustic “Pylon” strips the song to its bones, letting the melody and lyrics carry the weight without production to hide behind. It is a confident move, the kind an artist makes when she trusts a song to survive without its studio armor. For a record whose singles have trafficked in grunge textures, the choice to introduce its namesake track quietly reframes what Pylon might actually be about underneath the noise.
That noise, it turns out, comes with serious company. The album features a genuinely staggering roster of guests drawn from across the alternative-rock spectrum: Hayley Williams appears on “Nothing to Prove,” Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates lends himself to “Powerlines,” and there are further contributions from Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran. The 1975’s Matty Healy and George Daniel, longtime Beabadoobee collaborators through Dirty Hit, produced the track “Write Me a Letter.” It is a lineup that positions Pylon as her most ambitious and communal record yet, one that pulls emo, hardcore, shoegaze, and indie into the same orbit.
Building Toward the Arenas
The timing is strategic. The Red Rocks run was a warmup for something much larger: the “Powerlines” tour, Beabadoobee’s first-ever arena headline trek, which kicks off October 1 in Uncasville, Connecticut, before reaching the UK in November for shows in Glasgow, Cardiff, Manchester, and London. Debuting new material now, in smaller and mid-sized rooms, lets her road-test the songs before they have to fill arenas, a smart bit of sequencing for an artist making the jump to that scale.
Beabadoobee has kept busy in the gap between albums, too. Earlier this year she teamed with The Marías on the one-off single “All I Did Was Dream of You,” which arrived with a video inspired by Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, and she covered Elliott Smith’s “Say Yes” for the War Child compilation Help(2). Both nod to the same sensibility that runs through her best work, a reverence for melancholy songcraft filtered through her own generational lens.
Taken together, the Red Rocks debut and the album’s stacked credits suggest an artist entering her most expansive phase without losing the fragile intimacy that made her name. “Pylon” played quietly on an acoustic guitar is a reminder that beneath the guest features and arena ambitions, Beabadoobee is still, at heart, a songwriter who can silence a crowd with nothing but nerves and a melody. The album arrives September 18, and on this evidence, it may be her boldest yet.
