Beabadoobee's first arena tour goes on presale today behind her heaviest album yet

The presale opens today at 10 a.m. local, and the dates are the part that should stop you. Beabadoobee, who four years ago was uploading songs from a bedroom, is playing Madison Square Garden on Oct. 5 and London's O2 on Nov. 18. The Powerlines Tour, announced last week, is her first run of arena shows. General tickets go up July 2.

The tour is the surface. The album underneath it is the real news.

Beatrice Laus announced Pylon, her fourth record, on June 24. It lands Sept. 18 on Dirty Hit and Interscope, and the lead single "Sun Has Set" makes the direction plain. Where her last album, 2024's This Is How Tomorrow Moves, was a Rick Rubin production that smoothed her into soft-focus dream pop and hit No. 1 in the U.K., the new single goes the other way. It is built on chunky power chords and jagged guitar, closer to Nineties radio rock and Midwest emo than to the "Glue Song" she is still best known for. The video, directed by her partner Jake Erland, matches the volume.

Laus is blunt about what is driving it. "A lot of the songs on this record are things I wish I could have said to someone," she said of the single. "This song has this petty tunnel vision. It's like, 'I hate you.' You're gonna stay here and listen to how much I hate you. Because I never got to say that."

The guest list is the thesis

If you want to know where a record is headed, read who is on it. Pylon puts Hayley Williams of Paramore on "Nothing To Prove" and Turnstile's Brendan Yates on "Powerlines." It pulls in Chino Moreno of Deftones, Evan Stephens Hall of Pinegrove, and Title Fight's Shane Moran. Matty Healy and George Daniel of the 1975, her Dirty Hit labelmates, produced "Write Me A Letter."

That is not a dream-pop roster. It is a lineup drawn from hardcore, emo, and the heavier end of alt-rock, the scenes that trade in distortion and catharsis rather than reverb and mood. Yates fronts the most physical rock band in America right now. Moreno has spent thirty years making guitars sound like weather. Putting those names next to Williams, who can still write a chorus that detonates, tells you Laus wants the new songs to carry weight, not just texture.

What the title is about

The name fits the turn. Pylon is named for the steel electricity towers that carry high-voltage lines, the ones that march across a landscape whether anyone is watching. Per the album's press materials, the towers reminded Laus of the tether to friends and family back home while she was coming apart from isolation on the road. The fourteen-track sequence runs from the title song through "Switchblade," "Powerlines," and a closer called "Satellite," and the early read is a record about connection strung over long distances and a lot of static.

The arena bet

The jump is steep. This Is How Tomorrow Moves peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard 200, a career high but not an arena number. Booking the Garden and the O2 on the strength of one heavier single is a wager that the audience she built on intimacy will follow her into rooms ten times the size. The North American leg starts Oct. 1 at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut and works through Toronto, Texas, and the West Coast before crossing to the U.K. and Europe in late November.

Laus has stayed busy in the meantime. She cut "All I Did Was Dream of You" with the Marías earlier this year and turned in a cover of Elliott Smith's "Say Yes" for the Help(2) charity compilation that also features Olivia Rodrigo and Arctic Monkeys. The Smith cover is worth flagging, because for all the new noise on "Sun Has Set," that quiet, careful sensibility is still in her, and the question for September is whether Pylon can hold both at once.

We will know on Sept. 18. The presale tells you a lot of people are betting it can.