Beatrice Laus has a clear head on This Is How Tomorrow Moves. For her third record, the singer-songwriter, who records as Beabadoobee, steps outside of the whimsical world she built on 2022’s Beatopia and faces the messy reality of becoming an adult. For Laus, that means owning her faults — a rite of passage she tackles like a champ.
The London-based, Filipino-born artist basically came of age in the spotlight: In 2017, at 17, she went viral for her bubbly track “Coffee,” and signed to independent label Dirty Hit a year later. Laus followed up the internet hit with several indie-rock inspired EPs and a clever debut LP in 2020, Fake It Flowers. Two years later, she released the psychedelic, fairy-inspired Beatopia. In between churning out her unique blend of Nineties-inspired pop rock, she took the stage at Coachella and as an opener for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Now, at 24, she is using her latest offering to reexamine the whirlwind years she just lived through.
Laus cuts to the core with the opening track on This Is How Tomorrow Moves, “Take a Bite.” She sings, “I love to watch it bleed,” with a smirk, leaning into the chaos of her emotional landscape, only to realize she is addicted to the pain she often causes. Even though Bea is owning this flaw, it’s something she wants to change: “Don’t want to risk just making all the same mistakes,” she sings to a new lover between the twinkling strums of “Everseen.”
She continues to turn inward on “The Man That Left Too Soon,” a pensive note that finds the singer unpacking her issues with her absent father. “In a state of finding comfort in familiar places,” Laus whispers against a folky guitar, before realizing a key lesson: “The sadness is only temporary. It comes and it goes.” It’s an incredibly mature statement for a song that ends with the stinging line, “I wish I had met the man who had left too soon.” It’s clear Laus wants to continue to move past her trauma. “Writing cause I’m healing, never writing songs to hurt you,” she sings on “This Is How It Went.” But she still gets stuck on her traipse through womanhood on the morose ballad “Girl Song,” where she admits, “I’m figuring it out at my own pace” while fighting with her reflection in the mirror.
Bea’s growth sounds the strongest on album highlight “Beaches.” As crunchy guitars that recall Weezer’s “Island in the Sun” crash around the chorus, she finds her bliss in life’s duality, sharing her latest discovery: “Don’t wait for the tide, just to dip both your feet in.” Of course, the sentiment is reached in the serenity of Malibu, the home of producer Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio.
For someone who is still figuring it all out, Beabadoobee has never sounded as self-assured as she does on This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Thanks to the help of Rubin’s attentive production style, the album ventures into new territory but makes it feel worn-in. On “Coming Home,” Beabadoobee rounds out the mundane sweetness of missing her partner with jaunty, jazz-inflected jumps that brings to mind her peer, pop singer Laufey. Meanwhile, the sexy, bouncing bass on “Real Man” channels Bea’s inner Fiona Apple and serves as a perfect companion to her flawless falsetto.
But Bea is at her best when she mixes her super-charged guitar licks with sleek beats that are so good they conjure both a satisfying sense of nostalgia and prickly excitement. Whether it’s the sizzling chords in “Beaches” or in-your-face percussion in “Post,” Bea has crystallized her sonic landscape, thanks to her command of guitar and her angelic delivery. It’s a feat that makes us excited for whatever comes next.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.