Beabadoobee: This Is How Tomorrow Moves review – a nostalgic gen Z gem

Back in 2017, a grungy, lo-fi singer-songwriter called Beabadoobee emerged from west London, in thrall to 90s indie rock. Beatrice Laus’s breakout tune, Coffee, was an indie-folk bagatelle full of sad, hopeful charm.

Laus, in common with many gen Z creatives, didn’t differentiate too much between shoegaze, stripped-back balladeering or grunge. She channelled it all on her debut, 2020’s Fake It Flowers, wearing her influences like a charm bracelet – her 2019 song I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus hymned the singer of Pavement. Coffee, meanwhile, became the basis of a 2019 viral hit by the Canadian rapper Powfu (to date: 701m views on YouTube).

Born in the Philippines and raised in London, where she had a difficult adolescence, Laus, now 24, has confided how she has been subjected to racism and the fetishisation of Asian women. The downbeat worldview, sulky guitars and outsider stance of indie-grunge chimed with her inner weather. The genre was also undergoing a major representational reboot at the time (see: Mitski, Japanese Breakfast).

Serendipitously, Beabadoobee became a bellwether for the mood of the wider culture. Tired, her weary tune about propping up a foundering romantic partner, became emblematic of gen Z’s anhedonia – and featured on an episode of Heartstopper.

But Laus’s aesthetic had a lot of time for cute, colourful things too. Even as she hit her distortion pedal, a nostalgic sweetness pervaded her music, chiming with Laus’s childlike voice and her youthful moniker. Beabadoobee’s daydreamer sensibilities dominated 2022’s escapist second album, Beatopia, which offered up more retro stylings, but with a difference.

A bossa nova rhythm drove The Perfect Pair (one echoed by Laus’s collaboration last year with Laufey – the queen of gen Z jazz-pop – on A Night to Remember). Then came another viral phenomenon, Glue Song – a breezy ode to Laus’s current partner whose sentimentality was increased exponentially by a video filmed by said beau while the pair visited Laus’s grandmother in the Philippines. In the spring of 2023, Beabadoobee was a support act on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.

It follows that her latest outing, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, has a hornet-level buzz about it – and many stylistic circles to square. Into this make-or-break scenario arrives the 61-year-old, bearded super-producer Rick Rubin, perhaps the least obvious candidate for the job. Although this Yoda-like enabler is known for his ability to drill down to the essence of most genres, “zoomer supper jazz” might be a first.

What emerges is a fudge – but a very well-produced, beautifully played, elegantly arranged, tuneful fudge that somehow honours the attitudinous 90s core of Beabadoobee’s music – Pavement still loom large on songs such as California – while catering to the more winsome top notes trending now. Beabadoobee’s most viral tracks are her daintier miniatures; they have healthy showing here. A Cruel Affair is a bossa-indie fusion about a situationship.

Everything I Want, another paean to romantic bliss, provides the most audible segue from Glue Song. The words hit hard though: “I’m trying to do it right this time,” coos Laus, the weight of two albums and six EPs of relationship travails behind her.

What’s notable, too, is how closely Laus still cleaves to the heady swirl of 90s production on tracks such as Take a Bite, which simultaneously recalls 00s pop and Smashing Pumpkins. Ever Seen has a new, brassy gallop that tilts at Sufjan Stevens. But it’s the unexpected fusions that keep you fossicking incredulously through every track’s DNA. Post, for one, takes a Taylor Swift-ish pop song and runs it through a “zoomergaze” filter – zoomergaze being the latest iteration of My Bloody Valentine’s influence as refracted by the internet.

Across several songs, Elliott Smith emerges as a big inspiration – an obsession Laus shares with Phoebe Bridgers, the grand dame of gen Z indie revivalism. But here, Smith’s racked canon is mined mostly for his penchant for waltz time (as on Coming Home, a hymn to domesticity) and his mellower, Beatley strains (as on One Time). The album closer, This Is How It Went, finds Laus “listening to Elliott” and penning a meta lyric about writing songs, one that contains the album’s best one-line put-down. “You made it worse by just singing along,” she notes archly.

While little on This Is How Tomorrow Moves is wildly original, it is all thoroughly Beabadoobee – and all the iterations of Beabadoobee, to boot. Fudge is, after all, a sweet treat: old-school but still popular. This album documents a young woman’s growth from churning London outsider to confident, international-calibre balladeer – one who is able to broker peace between strands of music no one ever thought could share a tracklisting.