About a year ago, Beatrice Laus, AKA Beabadoobee, started taking ballet lessons. The acclaimed, perpetually TikTok-viral indie rock musician had been touring hard in 2022, and began to feel her body breaking down. Like most early-20s musicians – or twentysomethings in general – she was, at that time, “very mentally and physically unfit, and doing a lot of bad things to my body”. Eventually, she realised she needed to get herself in shape. “I’m a very weak human being – my immune system is very weak, so I just had to build that up,” she recalls, speaking from her west London bedroom. As for why she picked ballet, specifically? “I thought the outfits were cute,” she says, with a self-aware sheepishness. “Like, I’m trying to be real!”
Self-improvement has been on the mind a lot for Laus over the past year. Her third album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, due for release this summer, is a huge leap forward, finding her dealing with “the confusing world of becoming a woman and becoming an adult” with wit, honesty and grace. Co-produced by her longtime collaborator Jacob Bugden and pop music sage Rick Rubin at his Malibu studio Shangri-La, it’s a record that sees Laus trying to convey “a sense of confidence that I finally accepted within myself”.
