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Having admitted to blaming everyone else for her problems on her first two albums – Fake it Flowers (2020) and Beatopia (2022) – 24-year-old Beatrice Laus’ third LP finds the singer-songwriter taking responsibility for her actions. It’s not just the Filipino-British Gen Zer’s attitude that’s grown up. The songwriting on This Is How Tomorrow Moves has a deeper confidence to it, allowing Laus to embrace the sweet, hooky melodies, which swell above her Nineties-indie-inspired sound.
Reviewing her debut album four years ago, I was swept up in nostalgia for the decade of grungey shoegaze that Laus channelled so well with her scuzzy frustrations sloshing up and down her fretboard beneath candyfloss vocals. But I also hoped she’d move beyond her influences and develop her own sound. That is yet to happen; this album sends sonar pings bouncing off everyone from The Beatles (via Elliott Smith), The Sundays, Fiona Apple, Norah Jones and Taylor Swift, who Laus supported on the Eras tour last year.
Its opening track, “Take a Bite” even includes a clear echo of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. When Laus sings “I wanted to see the world in colour/ Through your eyes and through your mind”, she does it to the tune of the 1991 anthem. The moment is a knowing reference to the way Laus has interpreted her own troubled adolescence through vintage vinyl. And where she once sounded like she was playing dress up in the becardiganed sounds of the 1990s, here she sounds like she’s knitted them herself. Tracks such as “One Time” – loaded with woozy George Harrison-style guitar lines, slinky brass and Elliott Smith-y semi-tonal regret – and the terrific piano ballad “Girl Song” are beautifully crafted.
Legendary producer Rick Rubin (Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Jay Z, Kanye West) deserves some credit for helping Laus stand taller. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she described the six weeks she spent working with Rubin at his Shangri-La studio in Malibu as one long therapy session. He encouraged Laus and longtime collaborator/guitarist/co-producer Jacob Bugden to strip the songs back and play them acoustically until they felt the strength in the bones of the work.
I suspect another consequence of Rubin’s approach is the increased range of sonic texture here. Instead of hiding behind a rag rug of scuzzy guitar noise, Laus allows herself to play with breezy-trippy Bossa Nova on “Cruel Affair” and glossy, Swiftian country-plucked-pop on “Ever Seen”. The Malibu scenery of their workshops feeds into the imagery on “Beaches”, with a chord pattern that starts off by warmly washing over your toes before breaking in huge curls over your head.
Her vocals are also more grounded. The teenager who got her big break when her cutesy first song “Coffee” became a viral success now sounds like a woman with her heels firmly planted in the sand. This isn’t to say Laus has shed any of her distinctively featherlite style, only that now she is in full control of it. Against the swaying strum of album closer “This is How It Went”, Laus admits to still being a touch derivative and “writing songs about the songs I love to listen to” – that said she’s doing it rather deliciously.
