![]() ![]() “I have a tooth gem too,” one exclaims with a wide smile, in reference to the tiny rock that studs Kristi’s right incisor. Kristi is stopped at every corner by surprised fans dressed like disciples of the late Japanese street-style publication FRUiTS-fishnet arm warmers, color dipped pigtails, chunky shoes-and patiently takes pictures with each person who asks. Golden hour has arrived in full force, and seemingly every Y2K revivalist in the tri-state area has descended on the neighborhood in anticipation of the Beabadoobee show. One offers to retrieve a few options from the back, and promptly returns with a plaid micro mini and a knee-length black silk slip that Kristi buys. On the way to our next destination, the NYC thrifting institution Beacon’s Closet, Kristi gushes over the eternal hotness of Nelly Furtado, whose pre-Timbaland work inspired the track “Sunny Day.” Inside, as Kristi begins to sift through the rack of skirts, several employees come to pay their respects neither bangs nor a blue medical mask can disguise the trademark smattering of freckles that cover the bridge of her nose. She ends up wearing the skirt onstage that night. “I’m so indecisive, it’s the Gemini in me,” she says. She pops into a dressing room with several variations of black miniskirts and emerges in a textured number that bubbles around the hem. “Muted is the way to go,” she declares, before darting over to a pair of Mary Jane platforms that are far too large for her size-5 feet. Although she has dyed her hair a number of loud shades over the years-she memorialized her “blue-haired phase” in “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus”-she prefers a darker aesthetic. After checking the price tag and then her bank account, Kristi considers the store’s other options, all of which are black, navy, and off-white. “I was the biggest stoner I had ever been in my life at that point.” There’s something a little resiny about the entire album, which sounds like a shoegaze sensory bath, but the most obvious evidence of this is opener “Beatopia Cultsong,” a burst of easygoing psychedelia born from a late night studio hang featuring some pals and a bongo or two.īy now, we have arrived at The Dress, a cream frock that a modern version of Degas’ ballet dancers might rock on a night out. “At one point I joked that this album might as well be called weed and shrooms,” Kristi says with a laugh. The dreamy PinkPantheress team-up “Tinkerbell Is Overrated,” where she befriends the spiders living in her attic bedroom, was written during a particularly stir-crazy moment in quarantine. ![]() Kristi often sings from a place of solitude, even when she’s singing with others. On Beatopia, Matty Healy and George Daniel worked on several songs, with Healy contributing writing to the moody devotional “Pictures of Us.” She admits she used to be a “very closed” musician, but her friends in the 1975 have helped with that after they worked together on a 2021 EP. The recording process also pushed Beabadoobee out of her comfort zone regarding collaborations. “I am finally at a place where I can speak about things in a much more positive light and not dwell on the past as negatively as I had,” she says. ![]() The process of writing Beatopia into existence served as an opportunity for Kristi to accept and heal from childhood trauma. “I was a little 7-year-old girl and everyone started laughing at me.” Ashamed, she pushed Beatopia to the back of her mind for years.įor its follow-up, Kristi and guitarist Jacob Budgen worked out of a little room attached to the same London studio where they recorded Fake It Flowers. “He was like, ‘Do you have anything to tell us, Bea?’” she recalls with a grimace. When she returned to the classroom, a teacher had pinned her drawing to the wall. One day, she left a map of the realm at her desk before heading to a violin lesson. After Kristi’s family emigrated from the Philippines to London when she was 3, she retreated into her own imaginary world called Beatopia, including a detailed alphabet and carefully named continents. The long road to Beatopia begins with the metaphorical kicking of another small creature. An animal lover with an Instagram account dedicated to red pandas, Kristi looks legitimately horrified as she rewatches a viral video of the incident. Scheduled to take place at Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, the outdoor venue got completely flooded by rain, forcing fans to huddle for comfort in the stands somewhere along the way, a stagehand kicked a squirrel into the water as if it were a furry football. “We didn’t actually play the last show because of a tornado,” Kristi explains. She is visibly tired, but becomes animated when describing the bizarre conclusion to this mini-tour. The singer-songwriter just completed a brief run of North American shows alongside PinkPantheress and Halsey, and arrived in New York very late last night to play a show around Governors Ball.
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