Just shy of her first full decade as a recording artist, beabadoobee has grafted her quirky alt-rock roots to the slicker, adult contemporary bedroom pop of her recent growth as a major commercial force. This union on Pylon gives fans the best of everything we love about the songwriting of Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus: her warm, velvet blanket of a voice envelops every song, never obscured or overshadowed by lush, technicolour production and bold, creative, psychedelic-leaning arrangements. It's all the sunny-but-safe charm of "Beaches" tempered by the raw personality of her pre-pandemic EPs. The 14 songs of her fourth full-length album are a synergistic union of sophisticated pop sensibilities and idiosyncratic alternative experimentation, the likes of which have seldom been heard in a mainstream artist since before the 26 year old was born. Tracks like the Hayley Williams-featuring "Nothing to Prove" and "Radio" would've been perfectly at home alongside acts like the Smashing Pumpkins and No Doubt in the '90s, when alt-rock topped the charts and was given seemingly bottomless recording and marketing budgets. beabadoobee is perfectly positioned to be a major driving force in the largely female-led rock revolution that's been gaining momentum throughout the 2020s. The sublime pop chops that have helped her open for superstars like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo continue to give her the mass appeal necessary to really kick down the doors of contemporary culture; Evan Stephens Hall (Pinegrove) co-write "Spark" is a great example of how naturally she can pull off a "what if Taylor Swift was an unabashed Elliot Smith fan" moment. That said, it's very telling that she's pushing the energized, midwest emo-tinged "Sun Has Set" and the gleefully unconventional "Switchblade" as lead singles. The majority of Pylon is full of these elements of grit and invention, with glorious fraying barbs of fuzzed-out guitar shanking the cozy pop framework established on 2024's This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Even in the shiniest, most overtly pretty moments on the album (like the tender romanticism of "Write Me a Letter"), Laus invites the messy, incalculable chaos of humanity into these recordings. As a result, every song feels wild and alive, singular in its sonic fingerprint. Whether it's a deliberate reaction to the threat of artificiality threatening to subsume artistry (a topic woefully never far from the creative process and music industry at large these days) or, more simply, the interior instincts of a major talent feeling the freedom to embrace her innate sense of self, Pylon is a powerful marker — a sign of how possible it is to make music that's as filled with unselfconscious pop catharsis as it is with ragged, irreplaceable soul.