beabaoodee and NIKI Are Tired of Being Strong Girls
Across two new albums, beabadoobee and NIKI use their distinct brands of storytelling to turn the mirror back to themselves. The results are nothing short of compelling.
The California sun is intoxicating. It hits you on the beach as you dip your toes in the ocean and allow the water to eventually wash over you, pulling you in deeper, until you submit. But look around and listen carefully, because the beauty of California can also expose your own anxieties. Do I belong here? You might wonder. The vibes feel off.
Two singers who understand this best are NIKI and Beatrice Laus, who records under the stage name beabadoobee. On Friday, both women released their third studio albums: “Buzz” and “This Is How Tomorrow Moves”, respectively. California factors heavily into both womens’ iconography: NIKI has often used the state’s geography to look at her relationships from a circumspect stance. California is where she landed after signing with 88Rising, a year after landing in the U.S. for college. She feels at peace in this place, even if sometimes the pressures get to her. As her and her ex take different paths, as she writes on “Take Care”, she drives around the San Fernando Valley, taking her space far from him in Sherman Oaks. But for Laus, the beach can be as ominous as it is beautiful. Laus recorded much of her album in Malibu, a place that often made her nervous. “The idea of me kind of going into water, and what’s the point of just dipping your feet in when you could just go in full-force”, she said in an interview with Stereo Gum, is what inspired her favorite track “Beaches”.
These albums come at an important juncture in both women’s careers: After years of finding success with Asian audiences, the women are now pushing closer towards mainstream success. The effort is paying off: “This Is How Tomorrow Moves” is expected to hit number one on the UK’s album chart. Last week, NIKI was featured in a glowing profile story in The New York Times. It’s no coincidence, then, that these are the most adventurous and freewheeling records of both of the women’s careers. They are albums that start with a fiery fit of rage before slowly tempering down into ruminations on self-acceptance.
The radical acceptance of “Take a Bite”, the album opener and lead single of “This Is How Tomorrow Moves”, is a core theme of the album. Lau described as “finding comfort in chaotic things” and her own acceptance that she can be a “bit of a bitch.” What role Laus plays in each of these situations is a concept that she’s willing to examine. “It gets harder to breathe/ But I take it and I want it and I love when it bleeds,” she admits. 'Cause I'm craving expectations/ That are unattainable temptations.”
But this chaos serves the music well. Laus moves with ease throughout an album that is as hard to pin down as hard to pin down as its artists. She throws herself a variety of sounds that mix between 90s alternative rock (“One Time”), lo-fi indie rock (“Real Man”), and even some jazz (“Time My Shoes”). Throughout, Laus continues to look at her actions without much bias. She is a woman unafraid of admitting hard truths or taking the blame, even if it complicates her narrative. She points the finger, for example, at a lover who bored her and at herself for ignoring the problems on “One Time”. Instead of addressing the problems, she sings, she got high. “Keep on faking just to make it/ What’s the point in fixing problems when it’s broken? We were shameless,” Laus shouts on the bridge.
Perhaps the biggest indication that this is a big record for Laus is that it is produced by the highly esteemed Rick Rubin. Laus recorded much of the album with him in a beach house in Malibu, a place that often felt bewilderingly beautiful and strange to her. But Laus uses the location to her advantage, often grappling with her relationship to fame and success in her lyrics. “Don’t wait for the tide to dip your toe in,” she sings in “Beaches” over a guitar riff that is reminiscent of the highs of Hole’s alt-pop classic “Malibu”.
But throughout the record, Laus begins to peel back a tough shell to reveal a girl who is still processing her own self-worth. She looks at the trauma she endured as a girl growing up without a father on “The Man Who Left Too Soon” before she applies the effects of emotional wreckage to her current relationships on “Tie My Shoes”. “It’s all gone loose/ And the screws are with my old man/ He’s got nothing to lose/ Except to ruin my plans,” she sings as a saxophone quietly enters into Rubin’s excellent production.
Yet the finest stretch of “This Is How Tomorrow Moves” occurs when Laus owns her part in her destruction. “Just let me write a song like all the songs I love to listen to/ Writing cause I’m healing, never writing to hurt you,” she admits on the final track “This Is How It Went”. “Ultimately, I’d never write a song to hurt someone. I just write it the same way Aronofsky directs a fucking film,” she explained in the Stereo Gum interview. “So I think it just gave me peace of mind that if people heard this song they would understand the reason why I write.”
But eventually the stories grow tiring; the need to defend herself and explain away her actions becomes overwhelming. “Don’t want to speak/ Please let me go to sleep,” she protests with exasperation.
There are few performers as comfortable at explaining themselves as NIKI. On her sophomore album “Nicole”, her candid lyrics read like diary entries that microscopically analyzed the minute details of a seminal relationship. That album drew comparisons to the confessional lyrics of her childhood idol Taylor Swift. But the stories were more heartbreaking, and much more revealing than Swift’s work. “Did anything ever really count/ Or was I just a two year practice round?” she sings in the most crushing line of “Before”, a devastating opener for the album.
But the singer’s third album “Buzz” is less conceptual than “Nicole”. There is no storyline here that traces one relationship. Instead, NIKI takes a wider range look at life. “Buzz” is not just an album about romantic relationships, but rather the relationship NIKI is negotiating with herself. Throughout it all she details the downfalls of fame, the electric energy of performing for fans, and, in an electrifying middle stretch, the lingering doubts that come now that she’s alone.
NIKI wrote “Buzz” as her life changed around the success of “Nicole”. “I found myself on tour. I traveled all over the world. The most on-the-go two years of my life. And I would notice that “buzz” again, though this time, everywhere,” she said in a Q&A for the album. “When the band walks on. The buzzing of amps. The song is about to start. In New York City. The buzzing of a doorbell. Two drinks in. The buzzing lightness in your head. The threshold of truth. In the depths of desire. That buzzing in your bones. The precipice of action.”
NIKI details these observations as small vignettes in the opening track, and it’s one that I imagine was written to kick-start concerts at her upcoming tour. But “Buzz” is less immediate than “Nicole” and that is perhaps because the drama takes a while to creep in. The songs that fall flat are, disappointingly, the first introduction to the album – like the title track, which is catchy even if the singer’s observations about what gives her a buzz are a little bland. The rolling, bluesy first single “Too Much of a Good Thing” shares a surprising affinity with the songs being made by women in country music, which wouldn’t be a slight if it didn’t blunt NIKI’s ability to access her inner turmoil. That is problematic because NIKI has always been an artist able to maximize her pain and heartbreak for a good story.
But the amps fire up and the album takes flight with “Colossal Loss”, an angsty, firecracker of a song about a famefucker. It’s here that NIKI’s smart songwriting appears as she tells off a friend who used her because of her fame. “No, you don’t get to use my name/ I loved you like family, what a big fat shame,” she snarls before kicking into a deliciously vitriolic chorus. “Yeah, I’m gonna play the shit out of the blame game/ I actually think it’s criminally underrated.”
The following track, “Focus”, perhaps takes its biggest cues from the dialogue driven lyrics NIKI wrote on her 2022 single “High School in Jakarta”. “No, guys, I swear he's not emotionally unavailable/ He's just traumatized,” she protests to her friends in the pre-chorus. “No, guys, I swear he's not a lost cause/ It's just he hasn't met the girl that'll fix his life.” These lyrics are funny, punchy even, and recall the highs of “Jakarta”, where she compared high school to “modern Sparta” and lamented she “had no chance against the teenage suburban armadas”.
There is also a cathartic and satisfying stretch in the middle of the album where NIKI hits her strongest material. The mid-tempo ballad “Magnets” effectively captures the scary feelings of falling in love against all reason. “I’ve kept you at arm’s length/ But now my arm’s sore,” she sings. “You’re a mystic force/ I try to explain away through planets, of course/ But there’s no use, no rhyme or reason.” I’m also drawn to “Paths” which contains NIKI’s most touching writing as she wonders what the future holds for her and her ex. Here, NIKI mines the same touching lyricism she used in “Facebook Friends”, another track that questioned how to move on from love. “I thought we’d be married,” she sings wistfully, “Two pillars firm and proud.” But NIKI’s knack has always been in the sharpest of details about heartbreak and the knife plunges in when she muses, “If God really listens/ Like your mom says He does/ Then He better be saving you/ For our future kids and dogs.”
Yet where Laus and NIKI find the most common ground is when they write about the complicated relationship they have with themselves. California’s bright sheen is in the rearview as Laus strips away nearly all of the production down to a single piano for “Girl Song”, a track that she wrote alone in her hotel room at the end of her run on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. “In a way, I’m figuring it out at my own pace/ Just a girl who overthinks about proportions or her waist/ The creases on her face,” she admits. “Girl Song” depicts an extremely bad day, one where no matter how strong Laus tries to be, she still fails.
“Who am I if I can’t be everybody’s strong girl?” NIKI echoes on her own track “Strong Girl”. In both tracks, the women confront an inner toughness that feels impossible to shake. For NIKI, this came from her mother who often encouraged her to show no fear, while Laus’ came from a worn down self-preservatoin. Yet the toughness is proving to be exhausting. “I’m a pendulum, I don’t know where I’ll land/ I just know that I can swing it,” NIKI sings as the instrumentation swells. “I’ll always swing it.”
It’s tough growing older, even harder to accept our flaws. But in both songs, NIKI and Laus seem to have cracked something important: We may not know where we’ll land on our journey to self-acceptance, but we can always give ourselves grace to arrive in our own time.
