Madison Beer seals her feelings in locket

By Staff Writer Prisha Virmani

Madison Beer’s third album, locket, focuses on the way attachment feels like comfort, and familiarity turns into something we rely on even when it keeps us stuck. With locket, Beer moves into a quieter, more reflective sonic space, pairing glossy pop production with muted R&B and electronic elements. The album’s strength lies in its mood and control, though its emotional themes often repeat without moving toward resolution. 

The album’s central metaphor captures Beer’s complicated relationship with attachment and loneliness. A locket is something kept close, a container for memories, for people left behind but cannot stop carrying. Beer treats relationships like keepsakes, returning to them for familiarity in moments of isolation. On her previous album, Silence Between Songs, Beer maintained a more stripped-back, intimate sound throughout the album and locket deepens that narrative. Rather than preaching the abandonment of fixation on romantic validation, she examines it and admits how much of her identity still organizes itself around being wanted. 

That tension is clearest on “yes baby,” the album’s most confident track. Here, Beer frames being desired as a form of power, singing, “Basically a god, you pray to me,” looping affirmation into something almost ritualistic. The confidence feels performative, a kind of armor instead of belief. Then, “for the night” undercuts it. Suddenly, she is not in control but rather asking someone to cancel their plans and come save her: “You can take advantage of my weakness, at least for the night.” One song crowns her, the next unravels. Power and collapse exist in separate rooms on this album, and Beer never quite forces them to speak to each other. 

On “angel wings,” Beer turns avoidance into a coping strategy. She imagines someone who is still alive as if they are already gone. “When I talk about you, I’ll say rest in peace,” she sings, aware that it is a way of protecting herself. When faced with accepting absence, Beer instead chooses to dress in black and grieve. Beer shows self-awareness, which keeps the song from tipping into melodrama, but she stands by the tactic of avoidance instead of confronting it. That choice mirrors the album’s wider impulse to sit with feeling without forcing resolve or change, turning avoidance into a kind of emotional stasis. 

Sonically, locket is carried less by lyrical complexity and more by atmosphere, texture, and vocal performance. Lush pop melodies meet flushed out R&B and electronic flourishes, creating a soundscape that feels both intimate and layered. Many tracks maintain a steady mid-tempo, driven by soft synths, layered harmonies, and restrained beats that leave space for Beer’s voice to breathe. Instead of dramatic dips or high-energy pop moments, the album favors consistent mood and fluidity. The music doesn’t rush, instead drifting to reinforce the sense of emotional suspension that defines this era of her work. 

At the heart of this fleeting soundscape is Beer’s voice, the emotional engine of the record. She sings with a controlled softness that lets tone do the work the lyrics sometimes do not. Her delivery glides over the production with clarity and restraint, adding texture and atmosphere to simple melodies. On tracks like “bittersweet” and “nothing at all,” her phrasing stretches across the beat, creating a sense of anticipation and subtle unease. The result is an album that communicates feelings through sound as much as through story. 

Still, the album’s strengths also reveal its limits. At times the emotional terrain starts to feel repetitive, as Beer returns to the same cycles of attachment and hesitation that are often lyrically lacking. She introduces many ideas about insecurity and dependance, but unpacks them only in vague terms, repeating phrases that lack the depth needed to fully convey her message. The writing feels sparse, even underdeveloped, but her soft, melodic delivery compensates for what the words sometimes fail to convey. In a pop landscape driven by maximalism and immediacy, locket moves in the opposite direction with its genre-blending approach. It has a distinctive, effortless tone, even when the narrative range is limited. 

locket opens a space for Beer to observe her emotional patterns without forcing herself to resolve or escape them. The album lives between control and collapse, power and dependence, memory and movement. Beer does not pretend she is past any of it. Instead, she puts the feelings in a locket and keeps them close, letting the listener feel the push and pull of desire the way she does.

 

Grade: A-