Beatopia was initially a visual world that Bea created as a child – working on it while daydreaming in class - but after a teacher publicly poked fun at it, she left that world behind.

It took the pair a year to create Bea's second album, with help from Matty, George, Bombay Bicycle Club's Jack Steadman, Jockstrap's Georgia Ellery, Cavetown and PinkPantheress. At one point, it was over twenty tracks long ("and there were some really fucking weird songs on there", including a dance track inspired by The Chemical Brothers), but the pair cut it back to fourteen interesting, evocative numbers.

"We just wanted it to be clear and confident and deliberate," explains Bea, though she's still hoping to release the more outlandish tracks in the future.

With the pair having the exact same taste, they pulled together an eclectic playlist featuring Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Cardigans, Broken Social Scene, Cibo Matto and Stars. "I really looked up to all these artists. They all made music not giving a fuck about who it appealed to or if it made sense to other people, just as long as it made sense to them. I got really inspired by that idea," says Bea. The result is a "trippy" record that allows the listener to "escape reality or feel like they're coming out of a lucid dream."

There's the oh-so-emo 'Pictures Of Us', co-written with Healy (which features a similar chord progression to 'Rockstar' by Hannah Montana), while 'Perfect Pair' is a "sexy, sultry love song about realising that your worst enemy is yourself". Then there's 'Tinkerbell Is Overrated', a PinkPantheress-featuring riot that was the first song written for 'Beatopia'. "I had COVID, I was isolating in my room, and I went insane – in the best way possible," she says. The track sees Bea talking about the bugs in her room and how everything outside of that moment is overrated, performed over warped synths and urgent drum loops.

So far, so free, but Bea also had to get out of her way on tracks like 'Sunny Day' and 'Love Song'. "I knew I could write an acoustic guitar-driven love song because I've done it so many times before. But I wanted to make the best version of that song possible," she says.

As for the soaring dream-pop of 'Sunny Day', "I love Gabrielle, I love Natasha Bedingfield, and I love Nelly Furtado. Why can't I write a song inspired by those incredible artists?"

Before, Bea had been more deliberate in her shock factor. With 'Coffee' once again going viral in 2020, she felt she needed to prove she was more than a one TikTok wonder, which fuelled the creation of debut album 'Fake It Flowers'. "I was pleasing myself with that record, but part of me wanted to prove myself to others." She has no regrets about it, but she's also aware of the limitations she put upon herself at the time. "I almost felt the need to follow a certain genre and stick to a certain sound," she admits.

'Fake It Flowers' also came after a huge tour with The 1975. "I wanted to make music that could fill arenas," she admits. "During that era, I was obsessed with the internet and reading every single comment about me. I was obsessed with what people thought about me – as a person and as a musician." 'Fake It Flowers' was released in October 2021, and sometime between then and now, that changed. "I stopped giving a fuck," laughs Bea.

That freedom is 'Beatopia'. "It's a feeling I knew I needed to share," says Bea. "'Beatopia' is a concept record, but it's also something everyone has in them. You just need to dig down, find it within yourself and accept it."

That 'Beatopia' feeling is "when you're comfortable in your own body, your decisions and your past. You own all the bad shit, rather than being trapped by it."

"I was itching to write these songs," says Bea. It's why the lyrics for this record deal with the present, as opposed to 'Fake It Flowers', which was focused on the past. Demos were written, sat on and revisited over several months. In her confessional lyrics, Bea would talk openly about past traumas, from attending an all-girls Catholic boarding school, to the trauma of moving to England from the Philippines when she was two.

People still want her to stay sad, though. Earlier this week, a fan DMed her, telling Bea how excited she was to hear 'Ripples' because they knew it was going to be depressing before asking how miserable '10 36' was. "It's got sad lyrics, but it's an upbeat pop song," Bea replied. She was greeted with a sad emoji. "This balance is good for me," she shrugs.

Sure, sometimes beabadoobee does beat herself up over the fact she doesn't write sprawling yet intricate poetry about how she's feeling, perhaps via a clever metaphor. She knows she could try (and based on past successes, she'd probably smash it), but "why not just say