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VICE Album Reviews, September 18: Beabadoobee, Boy Harsher, Actress, and More

Getting ruthless with the latest releases from Emma Ruth Rundle, Jawdropped, and Perennial.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffin.

Read this month’s album reviews here and here.

Beabadoobee, Pylon Dirty HitLike many Beabadoobee fans, my entry point came through label-mate / The 1975 frontman Matty Healy’s considerable efforts to promote her yearning grunge-pop. Unlike many of those fans, my first exposure came while listening to The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.

I’ve always imagined that, during this interview, the great Gen X novelist suffered something I call a “Reverse Hoobastank”—the revelation that there’s an artist called Beabadoobee, sparking the realization that your mind is “clearly degraded,” that you’re an old man, and that you’re dying. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the unhinged enthusiasm with which Matty pronounced the word “Beabadoobee” became a personal meme, encapsulating the sense of the world moving on and leaving me behind.

I actually held out on listening to her for the longest time because of this. That was my loss: Bea’s music has a raw personality that is both timeless and distinct, and Pylon (which finds her at roughly the same age I was when the aforementioned podcast dropped) is the clearest expression of this yet.

This record slings an electrical cable from jaded ’80s AOR to fuzzy ’90s disaffection, stretching it taut over a frame of Gen Z bedroom confessionalism. It explores how it feels when the “certitude” of your early twenties gives way to a “chasm of confusion and indecision”—aka the rest of your life. The whole record buzzes with a........

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