beabadoobee’s ‘Pylon’ Keeps a Strong Center Amid Its Guest List

beabadoobee has spent three albums proving she can shift registers. ‘Fake It Flowers’ leaned into 90s alt-rock guitars. ‘Beatopia’ rebuilt a childhood fantasy world. ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’ pushed toward something more direct. On her fourth record, ‘Pylon’, she tests a different proposition: whether she can open the room to a long list of outside voices and still hold the center.

The guest list is dense. Paramore’s Hayley Williams appears on ‘Nothing to Prove’. Turnstile’s Brendan Yates lends his falsetto to ‘Powerlines’. The 1975’s George Daniel and Matty Healy produce, Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall writes lyrics, Deftones’ Chino Moreno sings backing vocals, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran contributes. That lineup could easily collapse into a stylistic collage. It doesn’t.

The steadiness comes from how beabadoobee uses each collaboration. Yates’ voice cuts through the gritty guitars on ‘Powerlines’ without redirecting the song. ‘Write Me A Letter’ opens with twinkling Midwest emo guitar — a recognizable Daniel and Healy mark — then moves into diaristic confession and spiky alt-grunge that stays clearly her own. The features read less like guest spots than like evidence: these are sounds she absorbed growing up, and she is the one arranging them.

That argument matters because her discography resists a fixed identity. ‘Pylon’ does not suggest she has finally found her sound. It suggests she understands that her sound keeps changing, and that she can direct it regardless of who else is in the room.