A Pylon and a Payphone Turn Beabadoobee Into an Arena Act

Beabadoobee in a press photo for Pylon.

Halfway into “Powerlines”, Beabadoobee is standing on top of a pylon. A miniature steel tower sits on one side of the stage on The Powerlines Tour, and at Madison Square Garden on 5 October she climbed it to sing the opening verse above the crowd, The Ticker reported. On the other side, under a street lamp, there is a payphone. The opening chorus of “Satellite”, the last song on her new album, comes through the receiver.

It is staging with a thesis. Pylon, her fourth album, takes its name from the electricity towers she watched slide past on the road between gigs, each one a reminder of the family and friends she had left at home. On her first arena tour, the towers have come indoors with her.

A Stage Built From the Album’s Own Image

The production commits to the idea. Reviews of the early October dates describe powerlines strung across the room, fake dirt roads and pavement on the stage, and screens on either side carrying a live feed, with the cables pulsing in colour in time with the music, as Scene in the Dark summarised them. In Boston, The Harvard Crimson watched the lines glow behind her all night and peak during the title track, when they flashed with the beat and “the stage looked like the album cover brought to life”.

The styling follows the set. The Crimson’s reviewer noted that her outfit fit the world of the show so closely that she looked like part of the stage design rather than someone performing in front of it. The camera work on the flanking screens tracked her movement closely enough that the back of the arena felt included. Nothing about the look reads as an afterthought.

That fits how the era has been presented from the start. The video for lead single “Sun Has Set” was directed by Jake Erland, her partner and longtime visual collaborator, and the tour plays like the same visual project carried into a much bigger room. Image and sound, built as one thing.

Pylon Is Her Loudest Record Yet

The album arrived on 18 September through Dirty Hit and Interscope, and Billboard described its sound as distortion-soaked and heavier than before. “Sun Has Set” opens the record with jagged guitars and biting vocals. According to the announcement, the songs began as diary entries: thoughts she had not been able to say out loud, now set to a lot of volume.

The guest list points the same way. Hayley Williams sings on “Nothing To Prove”. Brendan Yates, the Turnstile frontman, takes a verse on “Powerlines”. Chino Moreno of Deftones, Evan Stephens Hall of Pinegrove and Shane Moran of Title Fight also appear, and Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975, her Dirty Hit labelmates, worked on “Write Me A Letter”, uDiscover Music reported. Fourteen tracks, plenty of guitars, and a clear turn from the dream pop-inspired This Is How Tomorrow Moves, the 2024 album Rick Rubin helped produce.

The Numbers Behind the Bigger Rooms

The audience followed the volume. Pylon gave her a second UK No. 1 album in a row after This Is How Tomorrow Moves, Billboard reported; her earlier albums Fake It Flowers and Beatopia peaked at No. 8 and No. 4. In the US, Pylon opened at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 with 36,000 equivalent album units, 25,000 of them in sales. It is her first top 10 on that chart and her best sales week yet. Her previous high was No. 34.

Physical formats did a lot of the lifting. First-week sales were helped by 10 vinyl variants, three CD variants and two cassettes, and Pylon sold 16,000 copies on vinyl alone, enough for No. 2 on Billboard’s Vinyl Albums chart. For an artist whose image has always been part of the pitch, that is a collector’s audience turning up in force, and a strong signal for the arenas.

How the Setlist Moves Between Eras

The show runs long. The Crimson counted 28 songs in Boston, 11 of them from Pylon, spread through the night rather than front-loaded. “Sun Has Set” opens. “10:36” from 2022’s Beatopia and “Apple Cider” from 2019’s Loveworm follow, and “Care” carries the Fake It Flowers era into the arena. “Coffee”, the first song she ever released, arrives in an acoustic version, and at Madison Square Garden the phone torches went up for it.

The middle stretch slows down. After “Coffee” comes the title track, then “Pictures of Us” and “Memories”, with “Glue Song” and “The Perfect Pair” turning into loud singalongs. The encore closes on “Beaches” from This Is How Tomorrow Moves, which lets the night end warm rather than loud. Reports from the run also mention unreleased songs, with Scene in the Dark listing “The Road” and “Lemon to My Lime” from one show.

The Crimson’s verdict was that the tour proved “her songs hold up at arena scale”. The staging is a big part of how they get there.

From Central Park to the Garden

The jump in scale is real. Her previous tour, for This Is How Tomorrow Moves, played SummerStage in Central Park when it came to New York, according to The Ticker. This time she sold out Madison Square Garden. The Powerlines Tour opened on 1 October at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut, and its schedule has run through TD Garden in Boston, Scotiabank Arena in Toronto and The Kia Forum in Los Angeles.

The support bill is chosen with the same care as the set. Wisp, the Bay Area shoegaze artist, opens the North American and UK dates, which suits the heavier, fuzzier direction of the new songs. Violet Grohl supports the shows in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Where the Powerlines Tour Goes Next

Tonight, 24 October, the tour reaches Viejas Arena in San Diego. Oakland Arena follows on 26 October, then Rogers Arena in Vancouver on 28 October and Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle on 29 October. Scene in the Dark reports that at earlier dates Wisp went on around 8pm and Beabadoobee followed at about 9pm, finishing close to 10:40pm.

The UK leg opens at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow on 14 November, with Cardiff’s Utilita Arena on 16 November, Manchester’s AO Arena on 17 November and The O2 in London on 18 November. Europe follows, through Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Berlin, before a final date in Düsseldorf on 7 December, per Billboard’s announcement. The Ticker reports that the run continues to Manila in April 2027.

For another arena run that closed the loop on its own story, see our piece on Lorde ending the Ultrasound Tour in Austin, where it all started.

Why the Staging Matters

Plenty of artists put a big screen behind the band and call it production. What makes this run worth watching is how literal it is. Pylon is a record about distance and connection, and the show turns that into objects: a tower to climb, a payphone to sing through, powerlines that light up when the songs do. It is a persona built from the album’s own symbols.

It also answers the question every artist faces on the step up to arenas: how to keep a room that size inside songs that started as diary entries. Beabadoobee’s answer is to make the room look like the record. On the evidence of the first month, it works.