Beabadoobee Talks New Album and the Restorative Power of Coming Home

Mia Nazareno
·6 min read

Jules Moskovtchenko

In another life, Beatrice Laus comes home to her Lola’s house, where she’s greeted by lush plants and the aroma of onions and garlic sizzling on the pan. Outside, there’s chickens, kids playing and wide green fields with a single cow lounging in the shade. Perhaps on the weekends, she’ll sing Apo Hiking Society’s “Panalangin” on the karaoke machine. The idyllic scene above plays out in the "Glue Song” music video and racks up a staggering 23 million views — in this life, she’s Beabadoobee and opening for Taylor Swift on the record-breaking Eras Tour, and now, releasing her third studio album.

The Filipino-British singer-songwriter has been supplying the soundtrack to girlhood since releasing “Coffee” in 2017. The dreamy pop track caught the attention of execs at Dirty Hit in 2018 and earned her a home alongside labelmates The 1975 and Rina Sawayama, to name a few. And then in 2020, Bea secured a spot on the Billboard Hot 100 after the song was sampled on Powfu’s “death bed (coffee for your head),” which became a TikTok-assisted hit and sent her mainstream.

Two LPs and a pandemic later, it’s summer 2024 and Beabadoobee calls in from London. It feels like catching up with a longtime friend. She’s relaxed, smiley, and uses her boyfriend’s first name in conversation — almost like we, too, have known him all along. In a few days, she’ll be dropping her new album This Is How Tomorrow Moves, which she worked on with bandmate Jacob Bugden. But in a departure from her first two, this project was produced by hitmaker Rick Rubin, whose work spans decades with names like Adele, Johnny Cash, and Run-DMC sprinkled throughout his discography. “It was honestly scary at first because I had always made my records back home in London,” she tells Teen Vogue. “The idea of Rick Rubin making this record didn't even enter my brain. I didn’t think that it could happen to me."

Despite her nerves, Rick and Bea turned out to be a creative match thanks to their back-to-basics approach to making music. “He sees things in a more artistic and spiritual sense. He’s not [big on] the technical side of things, but he understands the music like no other,” she says. The most important aspect he brought to her album? Bolstering her confidence and agency in her songwriting, “keeping the song’s meaning at the forefront of the music.” You can hear that on a song like “Beaches,” a wistful serenade that captures that elusive feeling of self-assurance.

In this era of Beabadoobee, lots of things have changed since her debut Fake it Flowers in 2020 and follow-up Beatopia in 2022. If her early music is marked by the angst and recklessness of youth, TIHTM is defined by growth. Over the course of 14 tracks, the singer paints a powerful portrait of girlhood riddled with mistakes, but unlike her previous work, she inches towards adulthood and takes accountability. Summed up neatly in the final track (“This Is How It Went”), Bea sings: Writing ‘cause I’m healing, never writing songs to hurt you.

Behind the music, world tours and press circuit, Bea isn’t really any different from other Filipino kids in the diaspora. Her parents emigrated from Ilo-Ilo to West London in the early 2000s, during the British government’s push to recruit nurses from the Philippines. For many Filipinos abroad, success comes with the automatic reflex to give back and help the family, and that’s exactly what Bea did.

“[My parents] have no mortgage anymore [...] They’ve been on holiday. My brother has seen so much more of the world than I have at that age,” she shares proudly. As an added bonus, her parents have been able to take a step back from working for the National Health Service (NHS), the U.K.’s socialized healthcare system. “They’re just vibing,” she adds. Even at the height of her career, she’s not immune to playful jabs from her elders. “The first time my Lola [grandma] came to the U.K. and saw my house, she was like ‘Oh I thought it would be bigger,’” she shares with a laugh. (For context, criticism is a love language in Filipino families.)

As she prepares for a packed lineup of shows, we switch gears and talk about the restorative powers of going home. Whether it’s Ilo-Ilo or London, Bea admits that she's happiest and writes all the songs in her own space, as foreshadowed by the single “Coming Home.” “There’s a beauty in the most mundane things, especially when I live such a fast-paced life as a musician,” she says. “I tend to romanticize washing dishes a lot when I’m on the road.”

Now performing on the world’s most famous stages, Bea dreams of bringing it back home. “I wanna play in Palawan. I wanna play in Boracay. I wanna play on the beach, that’s the goal,” she says.

In 2023, she paid tribute to her birthplace when she dropped the music video for “Glue Song,” which was filmed on location in Ilo-Ilo. Her words speed up as her hometown enters the chat: “I love London because my friends are there, but Ilo-Ilo is much deeper. It’s the smell, the taste, the air. As soon as you get off that flight, you’re like ‘Oh my God, I automatically look hot.’ Like my skin gets better. This is the climate you’re meant to live in.” While the Philippines is still driven by the impossible pursuit of whiteness (courtesy of 300 years of Spanish colonization) Bea says on the record: “I constantly wanna look tanned, so I can look more Filipino.” Wanting a fairer complexion is a canon event built into the Filipino girl experience, we agree, but refuting that expectation, challenging it, is another sign of growing up.

Fully immersed in the moment, she goes on to mimic the sing-song cadence of her province’s dialect. “Ahhh-ahhh,” she demonstrates with two octaves and a couple head nods. “It’s so melodic. I say this with all the music I’m inspired by, but it happens subconsciously. I listen to it and hear the language so much that it weaves its way into my songwriting without realizing,” she adds.

Accompanying the confidence and self-acceptance in TIHTM, feelings of uncertainty round out the album’s (and adulthood’s) key themes. In the ballad “Girl Song,” she sings in her signature hushed tone: Waking up to hardly recognising my own face/ Just a stranger in the mirror, thinking oh what a shame. Given that resilience and personal development are byproducts of living through your 20s, Bea continues to explore the turmoil of insecurity. “I go through phases where I absolutely love myself and there are days when I don’t understand why I don’t like myself,” she says. “I get so caught up with my appearance and the way I act that it almost eats me up alive.” And it’s that vulnerability and shameless imperfection that draws her fans closer.

Before wrapping up, we touch on fame and the pressures of repping a community. Without hesitation and in two sentences, she reveals the secret to her success: “The way I write my music is done well because I talk about f–cking up all the time. And that’s the beauty of it, and if I have a responsibility, it’s just being honest.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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