For her debut sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, Beabadoobee showed the best of both worlds: alternative rock with a set unlike anything seen at the Garden before, complete with towering cell structures, glowing powerlines and showers of sparks, alongside the sweet, stripped-back acoustic moments that first made fans fall in love with her music.
When Bea took the stage, the garden’s transformation was perfect for the album’s unique visual world. The stage was built around the world of Pylon, with a giant cell tower rising above the band and powerlines stretching throughout the pit. The production made the arena feel less like a traditional concert venue and more like the audience had stepped into one of Bea’s songs — complete with roads, pavement and changing scenes projected across the screens behind her. “I love Pylon,” she said with a smile.
She opened with “Sun Has Set,” the distorted guitars immediately filling the Garden as the powerlines pulsed with light. Fans screamed along while the screens flanking the stage showed live footage of Bea and her band.
“10:36” followed, with Bea playing rhythm guitar, before the set moved into “Apple Cider,” a throwback to her 2019 album Loveworm. Hearing such an early deep cut so close to the beginning of the show was a treat for longtime fans, and the reaction made clear just how long some of the people in the crowd had been following her.
The set moved effortlessly through nearly every era of Beabadoobee’s catalog, from the bedroom-pop intimacy of her earliest work to the heavier alternative-rock sound of Pylon. Songs like “Care,” “Memories,” “The Perfect Pair,” “She Plays Bass” and “Cologne” had the Garden moving, while the newer material brought a noticeably heavier energy.
That contrast seemed to be exactly what Bea wanted to emphasize. “Thank you for supporting both sides of my music,” she told the crowd after drummer Luca Caruso placed a pair of cat ears on her head. “One where a pylon blows up, and another where I’m here wearing cat ears…”
It was a fitting description of the night. Bea’s viral song, a sweet and stripped-back acoustic track she originally wrote in her bedroom shortly after learning to play guitar, has since taken on a life far beyond its humble beginnings. Years after its release, and after finding a massive second life across TikTok and other social media platforms, the song has more than a billion Spotify streams. Inside Madison Square Garden, though, it felt surprisingly small.
The concert also gave fans a glimpse at music that has yet to be released, including “The Road,” which fit naturally into the Pylon era’s themes of travel, isolation and life on tour. The unreleased track stood alongside the album’s darker, heavier songs, giving fans another taste of the direction Bea is exploring beyond the music that has already made her a household name among her devoted fanbase.
The production continued to grow throughout the night. During “Powerlines,” Bea climbed the towering cell structure onstage, performing from high above the crowd while the lights and visuals continued to pulse below her. At another point, showers of sparks rained down from the stage, turning the Garden into something that felt much closer to a full-scale theatrical production than a traditional indie-rock show.
For all of the spectacle, the most memorable moments were often the simplest ones. Bea repeatedly stopped to introduce her band and speak directly to the audience, thanking fans for supporting her across the different phases of her career. She talked about Pylon and her genuine love of powerlines — not just the song, but the actual structures themselves — before returning to the music. “I never thought I’d be here.”
The emotional centerpiece came with “Glue Song,” which Bea dedicated to the crowd. What began as a small, intimate song became something much larger inside the Garden, with thousands of voices joining in. The show ultimately closed with “Beaches,” from 2024’s This Is How Tomorrow Moves. After nearly two hours of distorted guitars, glowing powerlines, acoustic interludes, unreleased songs and enough production to transform the Garden into its own little universe, the final song brought everything back down to something softer.
For an artist whose music has always existed somewhere between bedroom pop, alternative rock, shoegaze and pop, Beabadoobee’s first sold-out Madison Square Garden show felt like a fitting culmination of all those sides.
🎶 Beabadoobee’s full Madison Square Garden setlist
- “Sun Has Set”
- “10:36”
- “Apple Cider”
- “Radio”
- “All I Did Was Dream of You”
- “Take a Bite”
- “Care”
- “Coffee”
- “Pylon”
- “Pictures of Us”
- “The Road”
- “Memories”
- “Glue Song”
- “The Perfect Pair”
- “Powerlines”
- “Nothing to Prove”
- “Write Me a Letter”
- “Satellite”
- “Post”
- “It’s Alright”
- “Talk”
- “Switchblade”
- “She Plays Bass”
- “Cologne”
- “In Motion”
- “the way things go”
- “Lemon to My Lime”
- “Beaches”