Album Review: locket by Madison Beer
Madison Beer’s third album circles attachment like a nervous habit with desire used as distraction, leaving her confused for stability, running drills on relationships she already knows the ending to.
With Madison Beer, she keeps her intimacy in a pocket. That’s the conceit here, anyway, as the locket as a container for memory, for people you’ve left but can’t stop carrying. It’s a tidy metaphor for an album that treats relationships like keepsakes—small, portable, easy to open when you’re bored or lonely. Silence Between Songs was her bid for vocal and emotional credibility, a singer-songwriter pivot that felt like a course correction. locket doesn’t course-correct anything. It doubles down on romantic fixation as the organizing principle of her life, and the album is honest enough to notice this without being wise enough to change it. Control becomes romance, and romance becomes a coping mechanism.
The album’s most confident moment is “yes baby,” a track built on permission. She’s godlike here, or at least playing the part: “Basically a God, you pray to me.” The hook’s just affirmation on loop, and the song owns its own vanity. Beer wants to be wanted, and she wants to hear it over and over. The confidence reads as appetite, the kind of thing you chant to keep the feeling real. Then “for the night” arrives and the floor drops out. Suddenly she’s on the ground, asking someone to cancel their plans and come put her back together. “You can take advantage of my weakness/At least for the night.” The shift isn’t subtle. One song is about being worshipped. The other is about begging. She wants both roles, power and collapse, and the songs exist in separate rooms that never quite touch.
Beer imagines a living person as dead so she doesn’t have to miss them. That’s “angel wings,” the record’s bluntest defense mechanism. “When I talk about you, I’ll say rest in peace/I know that it’s sad, it’s such a tragedy.” The song acknowledges this is a performance, even a delusion. “I dress in all black, it’s easier to act like you aren’t here than to ignore.” There’s self-awareness baked in, which saves it from melodrama. But the song leans hard on the conceit without going deeper. It’s a coping trick, not a revelation. The bridge gestures toward messy reality—kissing ghosts, getting in the mood to reclaim her life—but Beer stays on the surface, describing the strategy without interrogating it.
The deepest material lives in staying when you know you should leave. “healthy habit” opens with a lie she’s telling herself: “It’s not a lack of options, I get bored.” She knows romanticizing an ex is a pattern. She calls it out by name. “It’s not a healthy habit, like the spare few/Like smoking in the kitchen and romanticizing you.” The honesty is disarming, but the song also circles without progressing. The chorus just asks the same question until the wondering becomes the answer: “And I wonder if it’s worth doing it again.” “bad enough” does the same thing with higher stakes. Her friends tell her the relationship is broken. She agrees. But it’s “not bad enough to let my baby go.” The logic is relapse thinking dressed up as standards. She knows she’s settling, knows the situation is dragging her down, and stays anyway because leaving requires a crisis she hasn’t hit yet. These songs aren’t saying anything new about bad relationships. They’re saying the same thing that everyone in a bad relationship says. That’s either the point or the limitation, depending on what you think pop songs are for.
The next set deals with something uglier with the way identity collapses when you’re too attached. “I only exist in the moments you’re talking to me,” Beer sings on “you’re still everything,” and it’s one of the record’s most unsettling lines. She’s describing total dependency of self-worth that only activates when someone else notices her. “complexity” picks up the thread with body image damage. “I look in the mirror and don’t see what you see/Wish I could forget what you said to me.” A single remark rewrites her self-perception. The writing is direct, almost too simple, but Beer’s voice sells the vulnerability. Whether simplicity is a strength here depends on your tolerance for pop therapy lyrics. She’s not hiding anything, but she’s also not complicating it.
The album’s clearest thinking happens on these two songs. “bittersweet” is a breakup song with decent restraint: “I know I should be bitter, but baby/Right now, I’m bittersweet.” Standard material, executed cleanly. “nothing at all” is something else. It’s about fearing recovery. “I’m afraid of getting better/I’m afraid it gets too good/‘Cause it can’t last forever.” The higher she rises, the worse the fall. So she stays in the middle, “not that miserable,” unwilling to spend energy fixing things because improvement feels like a trap. This is the album’s most honest admission—that she’s not stuck, she’s choosing the holding pattern. Whether she blames herself or fate for the cycle is unclear, which might be the most realistic thing about it.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “yes baby,” “for the night,” “complexity”