published on in News Flash

Bad teachers, drugs, gatekeepers: what drove Beabadoobee to make Beatopia

Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, professionally known as Beabadoobee, is a Filipino-English singer and songwriter. She released five extended plays on the independent label Dirty Hit between 2018 and 2021: Lice (2018), Patched Up (2018), Loveworm (2019), Space Cadet (2019), and Our Extended Play (2021). Fake It Flowers, her maiden studio album, was released in October 2020 to tremendous praise. Beatopia, her second studio album, was released on July 15, 2022.

Beabadoobee toured with labelmates 1975 on many legs of their Music for Cars Tour and American vocalist Clairo on her Immunity Tour. She received the Radar Award at the 2020 NME Awards and was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 2020 Brit Awards. In an annual BBC poll of music reviewers, Sound of 2020, Beabadoobee was also tipped as a breakthrough performer for 2020. Beabadoobee was a support act on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour in 2023.

What drove beabadoobee to make Beatopia

At the age of seven, Beabadoobee created an imaginative universe that her teacher and classmates derided. However, the premise inspired a dreamlike second album that refutes the notion that she is nothing more than a grunge-pop revivalist. Who’s the one laughing now?

beabadoobee rewired ’90s alt-rock for Gen Z on her debut album Fake It Flowers to great success. However, the Filipino-British artist’s follow-up significantly broadens her sound.

Beatopia, this week’s Feature Album, begins with a folky, slowly shifting background that builds up to a misty COVID chant of ‘Is it me or recently time is going slowly?’

She fine-tunes a pretty-yet-grittier sound, as evidenced by the textural layers in ‘fairy song’ and ‘See you Soon,’ the latter threatening to peak but instead softly expanding into a ballooning cloud of melody.

The songs sigh and sway more than they crunch and burst, making the hooky moments that do cut through all the more shocking.

Beatopia (pronounced bay-a-topia) is based on the imagined world created by beabadoobee when she was seven years old in order to escape a tough upbringing.

“I became completely obsessed with it and made this crazy poster,” she explains to triple j. “Made up all these country names, this alphabet, cities.” Her fantasy world was shattered one terrible day at school.

After a violin lesson, she returned to class to find “my teacher had pinned [the poster] up on the wall and everyone was laughing at me.”” “Talk about a traumatic experience!””It was humiliating,” she squirms. “But as a true Gemini, I laughed with them…”

“I honestly think he was jealous that he wasn’t creative enough to make up a world as cool as beatopia,” quips the 22-year-old, who was even more forthright about the encounter in an Instagram post: “Anyways f**k you Mr. Roberts.”

We’d love to know what Mr. Roberts thinks of Beatrice Kristi Laus, his little student who has blossomed into Gen Z idol beabadoobee.

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