Madison Beer, ‘Locket’: Album Review

Madison Beer was only 13 years old back in 2012, when Justin Bieber discovered her YouTube covers, then shared one on Twitter, helping launch her career. Beer has been a pop personality for more than a decade now, but while she’s since become well-known enough to have her own TMZ tag and appear on the celebrity edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race, her music only broached the Hot 100 for the first time this month.

Beer’s breakthrough track “Bittersweet,” a plush, post-breakup cut that whipsaws through the stages of post-relationship grief with a generous clarity, appears on Locket, her third album. A dreamy yet clear-eyed gaze into the highs and lows of young love, the compact album represents a creative breakthrough for Beer, who stretches herself lyrically and vocally across its 11 tracks. “I’m getting over what you put me through/And I’d say I’m done crying, but baby/I don’t lie like you do,” she coos on the chorus of “bttersweet”; while the statement is pointed toward a duplicitous ex-lover, it reveals emotional maturity, the willingness to admit her sadness as a means of moving past it.

Locket was gorgeously produced by Beer and a handful of others, with the singer’s voice providing the candy-coated center for electropop confections like the sumptuous piece of pillow talk “angel’s wings.” The glitchy “complexity” is a call for a lover to get their act together that’s coated in gloppy synths, while “bad enough” pairs firework synths with emotional pyrotechnics. 

Closing track “nothing at all” finds Beer embarking on a few dazzling vocal runs amidst an increasingly frenetic dance beat. It ends with Beer’s voice in chorus with itself before dissolving into a morass that eventually renders it indistinguishable from the surrounding synths — a finish that feels like the culmination of a catharsis.