The Gen Z songwriter’s sad, dreamy songs revive the spirit of 90s indie popThe heady sound of 90s alternative pop is being well scrubbed and shined by 21st-century teenagers. Enter Beabadoobee, aka 19-year-old Pavement aficionado Bea Kristi, born in the Philippines and raised in west London. From there, she writes sweetly sung sad songs that recall the dreamy sounds of Belly and Lush, and more contemporary touchstones such as US singer-songwriter Florist. Kristi’s lyrics peer inward, tearing gentle lines around subjects such as lost love (Disappear), self-harm (Bobby) and realising you love people (“Wait, I do – fuck!”, she sings on
Apple Cider).
Her story sounds too good to be true. Kristi wrote her very first song, Coffee, in her bedroom in 2017, after her dad bought her a secondhand guitar (she’d already spent seven years playing the violin). A friend uploaded a muffled recording of it to Spotify and Bandcamp, where it received hundreds of thousands of plays within days. A cover of Karen O’s The Moon Song and an EP, Lice, followed, before she was signed to Dirty Hit, label of the 1975 and Wolf Alice. Two lusher seven-track EPs, Patched Up and Loveworm, appeared in December and April, and another one, Space Cadet, arrives next month, complete with Kristi’s fleshed-out live band. Its lead track, She Plays Bass, is a sugar rush of a song, a lovelorn ode to a female musician.