{"id":1048907,"date":"2022-07-11T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1048907"},"modified":"2022-07-11T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T11:00:00","slug":"shopping-in-brooklyn-with-beabadoobee-grunge-pop-sweetheart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1048907","title":{"rendered":"Shopping in Brooklyn With Beabadoobee, Grunge-Pop Sweetheart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Shopping in Brooklyn With Beabadoobee, Grunge-Pop Sweetheart<\/h1>\n
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The British singer-songwriter talks thrifting, chemical influences, and the fantasy world behind her new record, Beatopia.<\/em><\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Quinn Moreland<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Bea Kristi\u2019s mind is elsewhere. Specifically, the 22-year-old better known as Beabadoobee is preoccupied with a dress in the window of a vintage shop that she passed on her way from the venue where she\u2019ll perform tonight. The plan had been to discuss her upcoming record, Beatopia<\/em>, at a nearby wine bar, but it\u2019s hard to pass up an opportunity to go shopping with a veritable style icon who\u2019s appeared in Marc Jacobs campaigns. Today, she\u2019s wearing low-rise jeans that overflow onto her sneakers, and a plain black halter top that reveals an assortment of tattoos: a Peanuts panel on the inside of one arm, a doodle of kitten face on her knuckle, a spindly pink butterfly at the top of her sternum.<\/p>\n

The singer-songwriter just completed a brief run of North American shows alongside PinkPantheress and Halsey, and arrived in New York very late last night to play a show around Governors Ball. She is visibly tired, but becomes animated when describing the bizarre conclusion to this mini-tour. \u201cWe didn\u2019t actually play the last show because of a tornado,\u201d Kristi explains. Scheduled to take place at Maryland\u2019s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the outdoor venue got completely flooded by rain, forcing fans to huddle for comfort in the stands; somewhere along the way, a stagehand kicked a squirrel into the water as if it were a furry football. An animal lover with an Instagram account dedicated to red pandas, Kristi looks legitimately horrified as she rewatches a viral video of the incident.<\/p>\n

The long road to Beatopia<\/em> begins with the metaphorical kicking of another small creature. After Kristi\u2019s family emigrated from the Philippines to London when she was 3, she retreated into her own imaginary world called Beatopia, including a detailed alphabet and carefully named continents. One day, she left a map of the realm at her desk before heading to a violin lesson. When she returned to the classroom, a teacher had pinned her drawing to the wall. \u201cHe was like, \u2018Do you have anything to tell us, Bea?\u2019\u201d she recalls with a grimace. \u201cI was a little 7-year-old girl and everyone started laughing at me.\u201d Ashamed, she pushed Beatopia to the back of her mind for years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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That sense of alienation persisted through adolescence, especially at the all-girls Catholic school where she was one of the rare Southeast Asian students. In 2017, after Kristi was kicked out of high school due to a combination of bad grades and behavior, her father bought her a guitar in the hopes that songwriting would pull her out of the doldrums. The first thing she ever wrote, a two-chord love song called \u201cCoffee,\u201d became an unexpected hit. The track\u2019s intimate sweetness appealed to the Canadian rapper Powfu, who sampled the track on his viral breakthrough \u201cDeath Bed (Coffee for Your Head),\u201d and Beabadoobee\u2019s knack for sticky hooks landed her with Dirty Hit, the London-based label behind the 1975. After a handful of buzzy, fuzzy EPs, in 2020 she released her debut album, Fake It Flowers<\/em>, a collection of \u201990s-inspired indie-pop nostalgia.<\/p>\n

For its follow-up, Kristi and guitarist Jacob Budgen worked out of a little room attached to the same London studio where they recorded Fake It Flowers<\/em>. The process of writing Beatopia<\/em> into existence served as an opportunity for Kristi to accept and heal from childhood trauma. \u201cI am finally at a place where I can speak about things in a much more positive light and not dwell on the past as negatively as I had,\u201d she says. The recording process also pushed Beabadoobee out of her comfort zone regarding collaborations. She admits she used to be a \u201cvery closed\u201d musician, but her friends in the 1975 have helped with that after they worked together on a 2021 EP. On Beatopia<\/em>, Matty Healy and George Daniel worked on several songs, with Healy contributing writing to the moody devotional \u201cPictures of Us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Kristi often sings from a place of solitude, even when she\u2019s singing with others. The dreamy PinkPantheress team-up \u201cTinkerbell Is Overrated,\u201d where she befriends the spiders living in her attic bedroom, was written during a particularly stir-crazy moment in quarantine. \u201cAt one point I joked that this album might as well be called weed and shrooms,\u201d Kristi says with a laugh. \u201cI was the biggest stoner I had ever been in my life at that point.\u201d There\u2019s something a little resiny about the entire album, which sounds like a shoegaze sensory bath, but the most obvious evidence of this is opener \u201cBeatopia Cultsong,\u201d a burst of easygoing psychedelia born from a late night studio hang featuring some pals and a bongo or two.<\/p>\n

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By now, we have arrived at The Dress, a cream frock that a modern version of Degas\u2019 ballet dancers might rock on a night out. After checking the price tag and then her bank account, Kristi considers the store\u2019s other options, all of which are black, navy, and off-white. Although she has dyed her hair a number of loud shades over the years\u2014she memorialized her \u201cblue-haired phase\u201d in \u201cI Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus\u201d\u2014she prefers a darker aesthetic. \u201cMuted is the way to go,\u201d she declares, before darting over to a pair of Mary Jane platforms that are far too large for her size-5 feet. She pops into a dressing room with several variations of black miniskirts and emerges in a textured number that bubbles around the hem. \u201cI\u2019m so indecisive, it\u2019s the Gemini in me,\u201d she says. She ends up wearing the skirt onstage that night.<\/p>\n

On the way to our next destination, the NYC thrifting institution Beacon\u2019s Closet, Kristi gushes over the eternal hotness of Nelly Furtado, whose pre-Timbaland work inspired the track \u201cSunny Day.\u201d Inside, as Kristi begins to sift through the rack of skirts, several employees come to pay their respects; neither bangs nor a blue medical mask can disguise the trademark smattering of freckles that cover the bridge of her nose. One offers to retrieve a few options from the back, and promptly returns with a plaid micro mini and a knee-length black silk slip that Kristi buys.<\/p>\n

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Golden hour has arrived in full force, and seemingly every Y2K revivalist in the tri-state area has descended on the neighborhood in anticipation of the Beabadoobee show. Kristi is stopped at every corner by surprised fans dressed like disciples of the late Japanese street-style publication FRUiTS\u2014fishnet arm warmers, color dipped pigtails, chunky shoes\u2014and patiently takes pictures with each person who asks. \u201cI have a tooth gem too,\u201d one exclaims with a wide smile, in reference to the tiny rock that studs Kristi\u2019s right incisor.<\/p>\n

Later that evening, Kristi performs to an audience full of those same fashionable fans. They\u2019ve tossed up a red panda with a Filipino flag tied around its neck, as well as their cellphones in hopes of a selfie. (For her part, Kristi would never turn her iPhone into a projectile\u2014\u201cbut I would throw my bra at Jeff Buckley if he were alive,\u201d she joked.) Near the end of her set, she launches into \u201c10:36,\u201d a sugar rush featuring a mumbled confession: \u201cI have this thing where I can\u2019t really be by myself.\u201d<\/strong> While Budgen tears into a guitar solo, Kristi gestures for the audience to divide in half. As the band hits the gas on the explosive final chorus, Kristi picks up her guitar, and the audience smashes together like magnets, a joyous mass of togetherness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/thepitch\/beabadoobee-beatopia-interview\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columns Shopping in Brooklyn With Beabadoobee, Grunge-Pop Sweetheart The British singer-songwriter talks thrifting, chemical influences, and the fantasy world behind her new record, Beatopia. By Quinn Moreland July 11, 2022 Photos by Aysia Marotta Bea Kristi\u2019s mind is elsewhere. Specifically, the 22-year-old better known as Beabadoobee is preoccupied with a dress in the window of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-1048907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1048907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1048907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1048907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1048907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1048907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}