There are things you’ll see no matter where you are in the world: folks sipping hot coffee in the morning, the stars at night, the ever-present McDonalds near a highway exit. They ground us when we’re far from home, allowing us to hold onto something solid as the earth moves quickly beneath us. On tour, Bea Laus, known by her stage name beabadoobee, looked for pylons. The spindly, towering, power line-supporting structures poke into the sky on roadsides, in fields, across mountains and deserts. Where there is little else by way of infrastructure, you’re likely to find a pylon, no matter where you are. The behemoths’ ubiquity soothed Laus as she embarked on a tour in support of her third album, 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Far from her loved ones, she began slipping into confusion and fear. As the brash headiness of her teens and early twenties gave way to a sobering next chapter, Laus squinted at the road ahead of her. Was it pylons all the way down? Where was all that energy headed? Laus’ fourth album, named after those towers, swerves between the zip and crackle of the electricity they hold and the long, quiet stretches between their pulse-points. Fragile and glitchy, harsh and sweet, it attempts to juggle the multitudes of one’s mid-twenties in all their paralyzing glory. The album’s title track begins with an expression of desire: to be held so strong it supersedes the desire to have a life worth living. “I’d rather be nowhere with you / Than somewhere without you,” Laus croons in her syrupy voice. It’s lovely, but also a bit nauseating. The song itself seems to realize that fact, fuzzing and distorting into itself like a torpedo gone off course or a too-fast heartbeat. The emo-inflected “Powerlines,” which features TURNSTILE vocalist Brendan Yates, similarly spins off-course into a prison of its own making. “Living in a fantasy / Through my pain you’re ecstasy / Let the rain fall,” the artists sing, taking turns wailing over a stormy, blurred loop. As with any beabadoobee project, love has fangs on Pylon. “Sun Has Set” is jagged and crisis-heavy, a far cry from the gentle girl whose pleading set the album’s tone. “When I say we’ll never be friends / I mean we’ll never pretend / Fuck that, you can never run back to me now,” Laus snarls, her canines sharpening. A fizzing, ur-Paramore guitar riff underlies her complaint, but that band’s influence on Pylon stretches far beyond “Sun Has Set.” Hayley Williams even appears on the anthemic “Nothing to Prove,” albeit only as a backing vocalist. So, too, does the omnipresent hand of the 1975’s Matty Healy, who produced the shimmery, heartrending “Write Me a Letter” alongside drummer George Daniels. The aforementioned artists lend their diaristic talents to Laus: her collaboration with Healy is particularly gut-punching, as dramatic and desirous as anything he tends to make. On Pylon, Laus pairs those instincts with a compulsion to flush things out—the need to shed things to move them forward, to lighten the burden she’s tasked with carrying. “I’m in motion, my emotions, melting in my head,” she laments on “In Motion.” The song bursts into catharsis as Laus cries, “Gotta get away from it / Gotta get away from here.” With contributions from Deftones’ Chino Moreno and Title Fight’s Shane Moran, Pylon is by far the most sharply produced album of Laus’ short discography. It is both hazy and crystalline, whisper-soft and crashingly loud. Laus steps into her stride on her fourth record, making good use of the toolkit she’s assembled since her first EP eight years ago. On Pylon, Laus finds herself physically and emotionally unmoored, a necessary mid-twenties ordeal—and an obvious but exciting follow-up to her preceding moods: angry and bashing on Fake It Flowers; soft and small on Beatopia; forgiving and triumphant on This Is How Tomorrow Moves. On Pylon, the emotions she traverses are elemental, often to the point of confusion. Laus has always possessed a preternatural ability to express the feelings we clasp closely to our chests, fearful that others will see them. On her fourth album, she sharpens her focus with an expert’s practiced eye, revealing our petty pleas and scoffing, self-protective maneuvers for the flimsy shields they are. The music is brave and scared and mean and darling. From one song to another, it’s a very good album unmistakably written by somebody still figuring herself out. [Dirty Hit/Interscope] Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.