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Iloilo to West London

Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus was born on 3 June 2000 in Iloilo City in the Philippines and moved to London with her family at the age of three. She grew up in West London on a mixture of Original Pilipino Music, 1990s pop and rock, and the indie records she found for herself later — Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Alex G — which is roughly the sound her own guitar playing would eventually arrive at.

She wrote her first song, "Coffee", on a borrowed acoustic in 2017. It was posted online without much of a plan behind it, and the stage name came from a joke: a friend suggested releasing music under something other than her own name, and she used the handle from her private Instagram account. The song passed 300,000 YouTube plays and the London label Dirty Hit signed her in April 2018.

Five EPs and a sample that went everywhere

Between 2018 and 2021 she released five EPs — Lice, Patched Up, Loveworm, Space Cadet and Our Extended Play — moving from four-track acoustics towards full-band arrangements. In the middle of that run, the Canadian rapper Powfu sampled "Coffee" for his 2019 track "Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)", which became one of the defining TikTok sleeper hits of the following year. It introduced her voice to an audience far larger than her own, and attached to a song she had written at seventeen with no expectations for it. She has spoken since about finding the scale of it difficult before making peace with it.

The debut album Fake It Flowers arrived in October 2020 and reached number eight in the UK. By then she had already been nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 2020 Brit Awards and had won the NME Radar Award. Beatopia followed in July 2022, a looser and more exploratory record that produced "the perfect pair", certified gold in the United States and still one of the biggest songs in her catalogue.

Rick Rubin, and the first number one

The third album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves, was released on 9 August 2024 and was produced by Rick Rubin and Jacob Bugden across six studios, including Shangri-La in Los Angeles and Abbey Road in London. It was the record that moved her from a well-liked indie act to a chart act: number one on the UK albums chart, her first, number 34 on the Billboard 200, number six in Australia, and a Metacritic average of 80 from seventeen reviews. It has since been certified silver in the UK. The singles ran from "Take a Bite" on 9 May 2024 through "Coming Home", "Ever Seen" and "Beaches", with "Real Man" following on 17 January 2025.

The touring around it was unusual for someone at that stage. She opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour in 2023 and for Olivia Rodrigo on the Guts World Tour in 2025 — stadium and arena support slots that gave her a great deal of time in front of crowds who had not come for her, and a working sense of how her songs behave in very large rooms.

Pylon: the loudest record she has made

The fourth album was announced on 24 June 2026 and released on 18 September through Dirty Hit and Interscope. Pylon is named for the steel towers that carry high-voltage lines across the countryside, an image she has connected to the people at home she felt cut off from while she was away touring. She has described the setting she built around the record as post-apocalyptic — the band playing under a pylon while everyone else has turned into zombies.

Musically it is a harder turn than anything in her catalogue: distorted guitars, grunge, 1990s radio rock and Midwest emo. "I have always loved hardcore emo and midwest emo, and I wanted to make my own version of that," she said of the direction. She produced all fourteen tracks with Jason Vance Harris, with Shane Moran of Title Fight and Gianluca Buccellati on four, Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975 on "Write Me A Letter", and Evan Stephens Hall of Pinegrove on "Spark". Hayley Williams sings lead on "Nothing To Prove", Brendan Yates of Turnstile takes co-lead on "Powerlines", and Chino Moreno of Deftones sings backing on "Satellite". The singles were "Sun Has Set" on 24 June, "Switchblade" on 14 July and "Memories" on 20 August.

Reviewing it for NME, Georgia Evans called it her most forceful record yet and praised its refusal to resolve anything: "There's something liberating about simply admitting you're still figuring it out." Laus has framed the same period as a recovery — "who I am right now, and who I was when I was making the record, is the closest I've ever been to who I was at 19" — after a stretch in which, by her own account, she lost herself in the machinery of the job.

Where things stand

Pylon went straight to number one on the Official Albums Chart in the week reported on 25 September 2026, her second consecutive chart-topper after This Is How Tomorrow Moves. Fake It Flowers and Beatopia both reached the top ten, so all four albums have now charted inside it.

The year before the record she kept a foot in the wider indie world: "All I Did Was Dream of You", a standalone single with The Marías released on 12 March 2026, reached number 16 on Billboard's Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart and number three on New Zealand's Hot Singles chart, with a video shot by Jake Erland and AboveGround in Vilnius at minus seventeen degrees.

The Powerlines Tour is her first headline run in arenas. Presale opened on 29 June 2026 and general sale on 2 July. She has been candid that the step up is not a comfortable one — "that's a bit nerve-wracking, but I'm really happy that I get to spend it with the people who have come, the fans and my band". An Australian run is scheduled for 2027; she has said Australia was among the first places her music found an audience.

On stage in 2026

The festival sets that preceded the tour give a clear picture of the band's current setting. At Lollapalooza on 2 August 2026 she played sixteen songs as the penultimate act on the T-Mobile Stage, her second appearance at the festival, having already played an official aftershow at the Salt Shed in Chicago on 31 July that ran from midnight to 1.15am. Rolling Stone Philippines described a career-spanning set played with frenetic energy and noticeably heavier than the studio versions, singling out "Further Away" as louder and edgier live than on record.

Five days later, at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on 7 August, the set ran to twenty-two songs between 9.30pm and 10.50pm, with Been Stellar and Wisp playing beforehand. It opened on "Sun Has Set", carried acoustic readings of "Coffee" and "the way things go", included "Memories" while it was still unreleased, and gave the title track "Pylon" its live debut in the encore before closing on "Switchblade" and "Beaches". Her stated approach to all of it is to let the performance go where it goes: "If I'm going to cry, I'll let myself cry. If I'm going to scream, I'll let myself scream."