SUNDAY READ: 'beabadoobee' writes hit songs from her bedroom, reports The NY Times

A Filipina Brit is on the verge of international stardom busting through the confines of social media, writes The New York Times.

The very first song Bea Kristi wrote, a spare, sweet tune called “Coffee,” has been streamed nearly 50 million times on Spotify. (The name beabadoobee came from an Instagram moniker she was using.) 

Other early songs followed a similarly frugal musical template and were tagged as “bedroom-pop,” a burgeoning subgenre associated with artists like Clairo, girl in red and Cavetown, who recorded tracks with emotionally revealing lyrics and spare instrumentation.

Kristi was born in Iloilo City in the Philippines, and emigrated with her parents to Camden, a cosmopolitan north London neighborhood, when she was 3. (They moved to her current house in Harrow three years ago.) She was an active child. She played violin, swam competitively, flirted with gymnastics and ballet, and recalled performing at a school talent show as a preteen.

“I was a dream kid until I hit puberty.” Growing up as one of few Asian children at an all-girls Catholic school led to feelings of intense alienation. “I remember being 14 and being embarrassed about my culture, wanting to be like all the other girls,” she said. Even among London’s Filipino community, she rarely felt she belonged.

The irony of Philippine-born Kristi’s virus lockdown? She was preparing to release her debut full-length album, “Fake It Flowers” (due Oct. 16), which is the culmination of a massive sonic shift — her grand departure from the bedroom. The album features crunching guitar riffs and propulsive drumming on tracks that could fit seamlessly among songs by Veruca Salt, the Lemonheads and Belly on MTV’s alternative rock showcase “120 Minutes” in the mid-1990s. Her challenge, though, was figuring out how to expand her aesthetic without losing its intimacy.

READ the complete article here.