Beabadoobee Mines Her Own Cosmic Dust

Like a lot of Instagram users her age, 20-year-old Bea Kristi has at least one alt account. Her main, for the confessional guitar music she releases as Beabadoobee (styled lowercase, naturally, remains a trove of promo pics, song teases, and bedroom selfies. That frees up her alt to devote prime grid real estate to especially pretty red pandas.


As with a lot of other ideas rooted in comfort and good vibes, Bea’s @redpandadoobee emerged from being stoned and scrolling on her phone. “I’m on the tour bus, and I think I just had the munchies. I was just munching on some food and I just come across this video of this red panda,” she tells MTV News. “So my guitar tech walks in, like, ‘You look like you're crying,’ and I'm like, yeah, no, these are the cutest things I've seen in my life. He leaves for about two hours and he comes back and he's like, ‘You've been in the same spot for two hours, doing the exact same thing.’ I just, for two hours, was staring at red panda videos and photographs, crying. It was an extraordinary experience In the United States, on the tour bus, consuming food some Chips Ahoy!”


One post finds the British singer-songwriter — who’s risen from lo-fi acoustic pop to the rock-star grandeur of her debut, Fake It Flowers in just three years — on a bed with her boyfriend and three photoshopped red pandas acting as their hypothetical children. The caption names them: Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene — also the title of her LP’s exciting final track that finds her manically in love and planning their future with each other. By the end of the song, Bea’s glee devolves into pure delirium, yelling the three names over a geyser of watery guitar noise. It’s a far cry from “Coffee,” the strummy, whistling jaunt that kicked off her career in 2017 and brought her further global recognition this year thanks to a sample on a Powfu cut that went supersonic on TikTok.


Yet “Yoshimi Forest Magdalene” is a fitting finale for Fake It Flowers (out today), which finds Bea projecting moments from her own life onto a much wider screen and glossing her sound with arena-ready bombast. "It was the musical group and I in a room with each other, two drum kits, and just going crazy,” she mentioned. “And I remember doing the vocal and just running around and screaming. Very fun.”


Much has been made about Bea’s sound developments in such a short time, especially associated with the heavily ’90s option and Britpop echoes on standouts like “Worth It” and “Sorry.” That aesthetic, similar to what labelmates and pals The 1975 explored on Notes on a Conditional Form, electrifies the twelve songs on Fake It Flowers, giving Bea a bedrock from which to share her occasionally funny, often offbeat truths. “I’ve had to put up with your shit as soon as you’re / Not even that cute,” she sings on “Dye It Red.” By “Emo Song,” she’s sharing nighttime poetry: “Nobody understands any time As soon as I was young / I lost myself in cosmic dust.” They’re the kinds of lines with a specific audience, even if she doesn’t name them directly.


“There was an ongoing theme in Fake It Flowers, the idea of everything I was supposed to tell someone however couldn't. So it's like a letter I was supposed to send out, yet never really sent out. Something I was supposed to tell them, however I couldn’t,” she says. “A lot of things happened Once I was a teenager, and I used a lot of things to sort of distract myself, and whether that was bad or good — well, it was mostly bad. I think writing 'Emo Song' as a whole just helped me sort of understand myself, understand that segment of my life a little more. That lyric is very special to me."


Bea, who worked on the album with her three musical group members and two producers, initially taught herself guitar through YouTube tutorials, starting with Sixpence None the Richer's staple "Kiss Me" and graduating to The Cure, The Moldy Peaches, and Elliott Smith. She uses alternate tunings as “little cheat codes” — the low-end rumble of 2019’s “She Plays Bass” cooperates with the give the song its lovesick bite — to simplify her playing and songwriting. (“All you need is one finger plus a nice tuning to create it sound super complicated.”)


Immediately after “Coffee” caught a person's eye of Dirty Hit Records, she signed with them and released four more and more elaborate EPs in 2018 and 2019; Fake It Flowers feels like the logical next step, louder and deeper without retreading any territory, even as she includes more songs addressed to her boyfriend, the videographer Soren Harrison, to whom she dedicated her entire 2018 EP Loveworm. This time, she employs playful subterfuge, titling one song “Horen Sarrison,” about “the surface level of love,” and singing “I want you to know to know that I’m in love / Nevertheless I don’t want you to feel comfortable.”


That her sojourn can take her from the warm glow of love to the raw fury noticed on “Charlie Brown,” an efficiency she referred to in the lead-up as “proper screamo,” is a marvel, one Bea embraced. “I've habitually wanted to scream on a record. I scream a lot any time I'm furious in my bedroom. I remember [producer Pete Robertson] being like, ‘Are you ready?’ And I'm like, dude, I was place on Earth ready. I want to scream so badly.” As a Sonic Youth-esque guitar fuse burns up, she screams “throw it away!” With the sort of youthful fury that beckons Gen X, millennial, and Zoomer rock lifers like power cables to a tube amp. It’s exactly why Fake It Flowers is destined to take Bea to the stratosphere — like Soccer Mommy’s “Circle the Drain” and Mxmtoon’s “Bon Iver,” Bea synthesizes ’90s and early-aughts sonic influences (and lyrical shout-outs) contemporary sensibilities and also a social media presence ("gettin this bread," her Twitter bio reads).


The acoustic-confessional Beabadoobee returns briefly in the album's penultimate track, "How Was Your Day?," A charming diary entry she captured on a four-track cassette recorder in Harrison's garden throughout quarantine. The song had been written right after she wrapped touring earlier this year, however as she went to press record, she modified the lyrics to resemble a newfound altruism lose unearthed in the months at house. Certainly the song is quite sad, nevertheless there's a sense of hopefulness in it, also it did not have that before," she mentioned. Immediately after this particularly hellish year, that hopefulness can some days even conquer the weepiness of the chords.


There's plenty of hope, also, on the @redpandadoobee page — "imagine being a little bit red panda and being cuddled by a EVEN BIGGER red panda" — along with in Bea's plans to meet an actual red panda someday soon. It won't be this year, because the pandemic shifted a suggested gig in Japan along with a stop at an animal sanctuary, yet she's got a potential contingency plan. "I know there really are red panda sanctuaries in London. I'd have travel up to be able to see them," she mentioned. "I don't think you could go and pet them, though. I'd like to touch them. I want to hold them in my arm. That's the goal."