Before Beau meant anything more than beautiful, Heather Goldin (singer/songwriter) and Emma Jenney (guitarist/songwriter) were just 13-year-olds improvising on patches of grass in New York City’s Washington Square Park for friends and strangers. Both the daughters of painters, the two became sisters in sound and poetry, weaving through teenage-hood as fast-growing vines around a pillar of self-expression. That was the beginning of Beau, making music best-described as melodic and lyrically impassioned. Sometimes synth dream pop, sometimes bedroom rock, with nods to electronic dance and alternative pop-punk, Beau is determinedly untethered to one particular genre. If in some alternate universe there is a place where The Ronettes, Joanna Newsom, Thom Yorke and Karen O meet, then that is the birthplace of Beau.

Nearly a decade has passed since the back-to-back releases of their self-titled EP and debut album That Thing Reality in 2015, and it has been experienced as one’s 20’s usually is: quickly and overwhelmingly, with a lot learned and a lot lost. Some career highlights include touring with swedish band Miike Snow, playing overseas in Paris at the Rock en Seine music festival, collaborating with award-winning producers Nicolas Vernhes (War on Drugs) and Andrew Wyatt (A Star is Born Original Soundtrack), and performing at iconic venues such as NYC’s Bowery Ballroom and The Bitter End, Lady Gaga’s old stomping grounds. Between gigs, life was also happening. Great loves were realized, hearts were broken. Friendships intensified, others faded away. The path forward, once full of nervous expectation, became a place of bittersweet surrender. It’s from this place of introspection that Beau is calling out with a release of grief and hope. Once kids shamelessly singing over the traffic of their native Greenwich Village, indie duo Heather Goldin and Emma Jenney of Beau are growing up and telling us how on their sophomore album, Girl Cried Wolf. 

With the support of newly launched Immortal Records and Music Engineer/producer Brandon Bost (mixer of Barbie: The Movie Original Soundtrack), Beau has compiled a montage of the quarter-life crisis. Slightly veering from earlier upbeat releases like “Dance With Me,” and “Animal Kingdom,” Girl Cried Wolf still has the “Beau charm,” as Jenney and Goldin like to call it. The tracks are catchy, and the words are fervent. Sonically, the album is a callback to millennial pop punk and alternative triumphs from high school days (think Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, Rilo Kiley, Fiona Apple) with a touch of dreamy synth pop (think Beach House and Cocteau Twins), tied together with some bedroom electronica (channelling Gorillaz, Animal Collective, CocoRosie). Across 8 melodically driven tracks, Beau takes us on a journey of stages, from desperate grief to ecstatic joy evoking a feeling of sunbaked nostalgia.

Girl Cried Wolf was recorded and mixed in Bost’s Brooklyn studio, Shifted. It’s no coincidence that the songs are reminiscent of an earlier era; their roots were written years before and given new life in 2024. Credit for this revival goes to Bost, who, in his search for inspiration, unearthed gems from the Beau archives and encouraged the women to revisit and breathe new life into old demos. One of those tracks turned out to be the lead single, “What Are You Doing To Me.”  Its high energy guitars and raw vocals bring the listener on a head banging heart-melting ride. “This song is about feeling completely out of control of your emotions and letting someone take you into their ecosystem whether you want to or not,” notes Beau.  This song represents the spirit of the band and of their New York indie soul. 

The recording process was geared toward retaining a raw, guitar-heavy sound through the use of vintage guitars, mics and synthesizers. (Shout out to Ludwig Persik for his contributions on guitar and Bost for recording live drums.) In the lead-up to the album, Emma and Heather were both in phases of looking back and moving on and across the LP’s 8 tracks the lyrics tell a heartbreaking story of people coming and going.  Almost as a premonition of hardship and healing to come, these songs of the past perfectly illustrate the storm before today’s calm. The reflective “Messy” describes the feeling of isolation and the need for friends to help pull you out of it, reminding you that every day is worth living to the fullest. Elsewhere on the album “‘Talk To Me’ is about moments when you need to speak to someone who won’t answer” says Beau. “It’s a feeling of loneliness, but also finding hope in the midst of it all.”Ultimately, Girl Cried Wolf sends a message of reflection and endurance. The takeaways are numerous. Whatever you are feeling, you might as well feel it fully. Letting go of the past and embracing the future is rarely a single act. It is a process wherein you might falter. When you do, own it with open eyes. Love yourself anyways. Feel it anyways. When you find clarity in life before now, it becomes easier to feed the right wolf going forward. Beau recognizes the never-ending dance between light and dark and is telling you to watch the show. As in the final song “Home To”, once you recognize darkness coming toward you, you can give it a name, shrug and say, “I guess I’ll sing instead.”