London Calling: Alt-Rock’s New Star
Beabadoobee’s journey from high school outsider to unforgettable songwriter
THREE YEARS AGO, BEA KRISTI uploaded a low-fi love song called “Coffee” to YouTube. It was the first song she’d written, ever. “I came home from school one day, and I think my dad had noticed that I was getting depressed and kind of bored, so he bought me a secondhand guitar,” recalls the 20-year-old London singer-songwriter. She wrote “Coffee” without giving it much thought — “The tempo changes halfway through, it’s dumb as fuck,” she says now — and it blew up, with more than 300,000 views. Soon she had a record deal with Dirty Hit, joining the same ranks as the 1975, Wolf Alice, and Rina Sawayama.
Kristi attended an all-girls Catholic school, where being the only Filipino student made it hard to fit in. She encountered the acerbic folk tunes of Kimya Dawson, a key early influence, after watching 2007’s Juno in a religious-education class:
“The teachers were like, ‘This is about teenage pregnancy.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit, this movie is so good, and the music is so good.’ ” Her first pair of EPs as Beabadoobee followed the same winning formula as “Coffee,” with simple guitar chords and melancholic lyrics; on her 2019 Loveworm EP, she began drawing from the reverb haziness of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, as well as the songwriting of Elliott Smith, for whom she has an “XO” tattooed on her arm. By the time Kristi released her Space Cadet EP last fall, she’d stepped fully into the role of an alt-rock torchbearer. She name-drops one of her heroes in “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus,” though you’d be wrong to call the song a cheap Pavement imitation; lyrically, it’s all Kristi’s own: “I wanted change, no one forced it/ My hair is blue, it’s pretty obvious/That I kinda like it,” she sings during a thundering grunge chorus.
“She has an intuitive sense for music,” says producer Pete Robinson. “It’s the way Kurt Cobain would write songs — she’s not trained in music, but the sounds in her mind are quite technically complicated.” Robinson was working with Kristi on her upcoming debut album when Britain went into lockdown. For now, Kristi is keeping herself busy on Instagram, posting mirror selfies that show off her newly bleached hair, her oversize sweaters, and her guitars. Eventually, she says, she’d like to be a teacher, possibly a composer of nursery-school songs. “And maybe write children’s books,” she says. “That’d be sick.” CLAIRE SHAFFER