Most recently the phenomenon has manifested in high-profile releases like Clairo’s Immunity, a moody and immersive album for which both sides of the hyphen in indie-pop seem locked in an endless battle for supremacy - or perhaps an eternal state of balance, a yin and yang that seems intuitive to many younger millennials and Generation Z. For the first time in years, it seems possible to become a pop star by making rock music. And then there are beabadoobee and her peers, rising in the wake of Mitski and Snail Mail and Waxahatchee to reopen a lane that has long been closed off. Notably, though, “Mood” is a TikTok-era pastiche of MySpace emo, and rapper Machine Gun Kelly just scored his first #1 album by fully pivoting to pop-punk. The difference is that back then lots of different kinds of rockers had a mainstream platform, from Linkin Park to the Strokes to blink-182, whereas nowadays even most of the acts within the alternative radio niche barely scan as rock music and the format’s #1 song, 24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “ Mood,” emerged out of the hip-hop ecosystem. After all, that’s exactly what happened the first time around, as initially underground stylings became further subsumed into the radio-friendly mainstream. It feels natural that after a fleet of talented young, largely female rock artists spent the 2010s reviving the ’90s, another wave of acts would come along to transmute that decade’s aesthetic into glossy, radio-friendly pop.
The British-Filipino musician’s debut album Fake It Flowers, out this Friday, marks her as the latest in a lineage of artists who’ve been moving this direction lately, nudging the indie and alt-rock sounds of the 1990s toward a lustrous, plaintive middle ground. Is beabadoobee a rock artist or a pop artist? The distinction doesn’t really matter, but 20-year-old Beatrice Laus, aka Bea Kristi, blurs the genre barrier in fascinating ways, to the point of nostalgic mirage.
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