Album Review: beabadoobee’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves
By Ansharah Shakil, September 7 2024—
Singer-songwriter Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, known professionally as beabadoobee, waited two years in-between her first full-length album Fake It Flowers and her second, Beatopia. Another two years past the release of Beatopia, Laus released her latest album, This is How Tomorrow Moves, on Aug. 9. This is How Tomorrow Moves is an indie-rock triumph, Laus’s graceful step forward in her music career and a firm move to tomorrow, just as the album title might suggest.
Laus combines the introspectivity of the album with lyrics and vocals that are elegant in their simplicity, the same kind of winning, cultivated and clearly honest quality that’s defined her discography. It’s nostalgia at its best, reminiscent of 90s rock and 2000s radio, with a timeless refinement to the sound. Elliott Smith, one of Laus’s major influences, is outright and appropriately referenced on the quiet, waltzing album closer “This is How It Went.”
Commercially successful first single and album opener “Take a Bite” is effortlessly catchy. Its entire composition is the kind that enters into your bloodstream, has you remembering the lyrics and melodies hours after your first listen. On “Take a Bite”, Laus channels Fiona Apple, something she does throughout the album, with lots of piano and a front-and-centre emphasis on the vocals — even the lyrical content of bossa nova track “Cruel Affair.” But with all these clever homages, Laus’s sound remains her own.
At some points, This is How Tomorrow Moves is missing the momentum and vitality of Laus and her band on the 2019 EP Space Cadet, the addictive quality of Fake It Flowers’s “Worth It” or the overpowering, gorgeous rush of Beatopia’s “10:36” and “Talk.” A lack of energy means “Coming Home” is fairly forgettable and all-over-the-place, production-wise. “One Time” would fall into the same one-note pattern if not for its riot of an outro.
But tracks like “California”, a vibrant and crisp showstopper, make up for that. Laus’s soft falsetto on the edge of the chorus and bridge contrast perfectly with the jangling chords and thrumming drums, each part of the whole shaped with precision. Cathartic grunge-rock track “Post” is another standout. Then there’s “Ever Seen”, the sweetest love song on the album, stunning in its painfully genuine emotion. The instrumentals are as dreamy and evocative as Laus’s vulnerable vocals. It feels like a complete story, from Laus beginning with “The highest I think I’ve ever been / Said I had thе prettiest eyеs he’d ever seen” in the first chorus and ending with “And when I get too high and I can’t breathe / I can’t lie, he has the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen” in the bridge. The latter transforms the song, shifting ground.
A common theme on the album is growing up, whether it’s getting sick of waiting for a boyfriend to grow up already on the jazz-toned “Real Man” or feeling like a small child seeking validation from her father in the poignant piano ballad “Tie My Shoes.” Or the conviction of wanting to move on, move forward, take the next step of jumping into the water with abandon, on “Beaches”, Laus’s own favourite track. For “Girl Song”, Laus goes through all the messiness, self-doubt and insecurity she feels on a daily basis to search for understanding. “Making all the same mistakes / I guess there’s still a lot to prove,” she sings, both frustrated and gentle with herself. In moments like these, she’s so human it’s impossible not to feel moved.
The push and pull of the guitar in “The Man Who Left Too Soon”, alongside wistful lyrics like “In a state of finding comfort in familiar places / That I know the sadness only temporary / It comes and it goes / Like the weather in the summer.” It’s an ode to her art: she sings about writing songs like all the songs she loves to listen to, writing to heal rather than to hurt. On This is How Tomorrow Moves, beabadoobee is finding peace. On the table is an accountability and maturity, a surety that isn’t unafraid, but is all the more impressive for moving past the fear and into tomorrow.