Beabadoobee – ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’ review: a beautiful portrait of womanhood

5 August, 2024

Beabadoobee

On ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’, Beabadoobee is exploring a new era of her life. After breaking out as a teenager with lo-fi bedroom pop, her early EPs (like 2018’s lovely ‘Patched Up’) were followed by two stellar full-length records of pop and rock tunes that documented coming of age and young adult years. With ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’ Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus continues to share her experience of growing up, and creating this album has, she’s said, helped her understand where she’s at, now aged 24, capturing her journey of “becoming a woman”.

Throughout ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’, Bea reflects on her own experiences of womanhood and the complex landscape you negotiate in those early years of adulthood. It’s a time in your life when you look at situations with a new clarity – something she does as she reflects on her own role in – and takes accountability for – past situations. As she’s explained: “It’s accepting that there’s an inevitability of my fault in there too.” It’s looking at her life through a slightly different lens, like putting on a different pair of glasses and finding the world is both familiar but suddenly a little sharper, a little clearer.

Take the record’s lead single ‘Take A Bite’, a growling hunk of ’90s rock on which the artist introspectively reflects on her own responsibility for unhealthy behaviour in relationships and “finding comfort in chaos”. “It gets harder to breathe/But I take it, and I want it, and I love when it bleeds,” she reveals honestly. On ‘Ever Seen’, an earworm reminiscent of the more rousing moments of Phoebe Bridgers’ music with its fanfare instrumentals, she’s similarly pensive, admitting: “Spent some time waiting for your face/Don’t want to risk just making all the same mistakes“.

There’s a slight sonic shift here, too. While the established sounds of her previous two records, ‘Fake It Flowers’ and ‘Beatopia’, are evident in the amped-up guitar licks, Bea’s distinct hushed vocals and folk-flecked moments here sound more refined. This could be the impact of one of the album’s exec producers, the illustrious Rick Rubin. For ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’, Bea swapped London for the producers’ Shangri-La studio in Malibu.

Indeed, track ‘Beaches’ was inspired by being in LA and the rediscovered trust Beabadoobee had in her own songwriting skills thanks to Rubin’s support, the Cali sunshine permeating the slack rock riffs. Elsewhere, the twinkling piano and skipping rhythms of ‘Real Man’, an eye roll about disappointing romantic trysts, evoke the folk of Clairo’s ‘Sling’, while she dabbles with Bossa Nova on ‘A Cruel Affair’ and there’s a lilting country twang to ‘Everything I Want’.

On the gorgeous ‘Girl Song’, a piano-lead ballad that showcases the very best of her songwriting, she strips things back. With just a simple piano accompaniment straight out of the Great American Songbook, she opens up about her own self-esteem, revealing she’s “just a girl who overthinks about/Proportions or her waist/The creases on her face”. Later, she admits: “All I want to do is find the words to make it up to you/Making all the same mistakes, I guess there’s still a lot to prove“.

It’s a heart-wrenching song, filled with a multitude of complex and often contradictory emotions, the knotty realities of young womanhood laid bare. That’s something that shines through the whole of ‘This Is How Tomorrow Moves’ – Beabadoobee’s knack for capturing the twists and turns of growing into yourself with relatable candour. A collection of songs that showcase the tangled feelings of this time, the young artist’s third record is a poignant, powerful thing.