The Official Charts guide to beabadoobee: Gen Z lyricist on cusp of first Number 1 album

Bea Kristi is on the verge of topping the Official Albums Chart for the first time with her mature and considered third album. How did she get here?

beabadoobee is just 24 years old, but has already carved out an incredible career over the last seven years.

Since her first release in 2017, beabadoobee (Bea's real name is Beatrice Laus) has refined her own brand of confessional indie-pop across three albums; 2020's Fake It Flowers, 2022's Beatopia and her latest, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, which is currently pacing to debut at Number 1 on the Official Albums Chart.

It would mark the first chart-topper for Bea, as well as her third consecutive UK Top 10 record, a testament to just how popular she is with both her grassroots Gen Z fans and an ever-expanding audience in the mainstream too.

Who is beabadoobee?

beabadoobee is the stage name for Filipino-English singer-songwriter Beatrice Laus, also known as Bea Kristi. Born in the Phillipines but moving to London with her parents at the age of three, growing up in West London. As a teenager, she started to take inspiration from rock acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeah's member Karen O, before buying her first guitar aged 17 (prior to this, she'd studied the violin for seven years, we love a classical girlie).

But Beatrice Laus morphed into beabadoobee in 2017, when she released an original song (Coffee, the first song she'd ever written on the guitar) and a cover of Karen O's The Moon Song. Coffee was an immediate viral success. logging 300k views on YouTube and gaining the attention of indie label Dirty Hit (home to The 1975), which quickly signed Bea to a deal. She quickly released three EPs (Lice, Patched Up and Loveworm) and joined labelmates The 1975 and similarly-ascendant indie icon Clairo on tour.

Bea came on most people's radars in 2020, the year her debut album was released, thanks to her pitched-up feature on Powfu's Death Bed (Death Bed samples the hook from Coffee), which went viral on TikTok earlier that year and became beabadoobee's first (and, as of the time of writing, only) UK Top 10 single, reaching Number 4 on the Official Singles Chart. Last year, she made another surprise appearence in the Top 40, reaching Number 38 with one-off single The Glue Song.

What kind of music does beabadoobee make?

The sonic palette of each of beabadoobee's three LPs is slightly different record-to-record, but they all find their feet in the world of confessional, acoustic indie-rock. Bea's first proper album, Fake It Flowers, was characterised with a distinct shoegaze aesthetic and a lo-fi, bedroom pop sound, putting her in conversation with the aforementioned Clairo, girl in red and PinkPantheress.

For her second LP, Beatopia, Bea switched it up a bit. A lot of that record is defined by a bright, rock-pop sheen and a general abivalent approach to genre, so much of it murkies the waters between indie, rock and pop, turning Bea into a more viable prospect for commercial pop success.

If Beatopia was Bea's coming out party as a hesitant pop star, however, her third record This Is How Tomorrow Moves is another soft pivot. Working with super-producer Rick Rubin, is distinguished, lyrically at least, from how it moves away from the bottled-up angst that had defined her earlier work. Working to a more cohesive indie-rock sound than Beatopia, the hooks on lead single Take A Bite are undeniable.

How is beabadoobee on track for Number 1 this week?

To put it simply, beabadoobee has become more sure of herself with each album release, and has seen an increased Official Chart presence with each release too. In 2020, Fake It Flowers debuted and peaked at Number 8 in the UK, while in 2022, the eclectic Beatopia did better still, charting at Number 4.

You get the sense, especially with This Is How Tomorrow Moves that Bea has grown her profile with each successive release, and is finally ready to enter the mainstream.

What beabadoobee songs should I listen to?

Below, we've curated an essential list of some of our favourite beabadoobee tracks that should help you get into her wider catalogue. Present, of course, is her breakthrough hit Dearh Bed, as well as two brilliantly bonkers slices of pop-rock from Beatopia, Talk and 10:36. If you want to get into This Is How Tomorrow Moves, we would suggest starting with its lead single, Take A Bite, which sounds like something Alanis Morrisette and Gwen Stefani might have come up with if they'd paid a visit to Shangri-La (Rubin's famous studio complex) in the mid-90s.