For Madison Beer, It’s Been A Long Road To The Brink Of A Breakthrough

I remember when I first heard about Madison Beer. It was 2012, and I was deep in the pop blogging mines, scrolling Google Reader under the eye of a life-size Justin Bieber cutout. The Western world had just been rocked by the smash K-pop hit "Gangnam Style." Blue Ivy was still a baby. Taylor Swift had no defined eras. And celebrities were still on Twitter, which was still Twitter. (Ah, better days.)

The titan of the medium was Justin Bieber; finagling a tweet by Bieber's people was the cross-promotional equivalent of landing a Super Bowl ad. That's how Carly Rae Jepsen went from Canadian Idol trivia answer to "Call Me Maybe" darling. And it's how a tweenage Madison Beer got discovered. In 2011, the aspiring singer booked time at Loft Sound Studios, a young-artist coaching center with voice lessons, a Club Libby Lu-esque birthday-party arm (now offering "the Ultimate K Pop Demon Hunters or Wicked Experience"!) and, crucially, some recording booths to record YouTube covers. Bieber's manager, teenpop impresario Scooter Braun, got hold of her version of Etta James' "At Last" and tweeted about her in June. His protege: “She can sing. Great job. #futurestar," following the not-actually-faint praise up with a few totally organic @'s: "haha. @carlyraejepsen watch this." and "@brunomars u gotta see one." (Beer's response, for the curious: "OMGOGMFHAHDBSBAWHEBSBSHHWEHHDXHSHHAFBBAGEEHYBT I CANT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING. I AM CRYING.") But 2012 was almost 14 years ago. In 2012, Beer wasn’t even 14 years old. She's now spent half her life becoming, yet never quite being, a pop star.

That's not to say she was quiet in the meantime. Beer guested on a few dance tracks. She did session vocals for the Monster High doll franchise and Riot Games' virtual girl group K/DA. She dabbled in runway modeling. She got into some influencer controversies and minor cancellations too petty to mention here. She even released a memoir, The Half Of It, in her early 20s -- which seems premature, until you realize she'd already been in the industry for 11 years.

The book is a combination pep talk ("Moral of the story: kindness is cool."), self-help journal ("If you could write a letter to your inner child, what would you say?"), and an attempt to find closure from some genuinely harrowing things that happened to her as a young musician. Beer talks about a breakdown leading to a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder — among the most stigmatized mental disorders, and quite brave to go public about — as well as relentless exploitation of her underage self, up to sexual abuse; having her nudes leaked when she was 15, then re-leaked over and over again; and her resulting life of paranoia. "If I have a friend over and we’re talking about something personal, a small, nagging voice in the back of my head always makes me wonder if they’re recording me," she wrote. "When I’m staying in hotel rooms on tour, I can’t go to bed until I sweep the room for cameras or microphones.... This is the constant state I function in." 

By 2021, Beer had recovered enough to really go for it: to emerge from, as her album title put it, her "silence between songs." She released two records, in 2021 and 2023, of middle-of-the-road guitar-drizzled pop that did fine. The lead single from her new album Locket, "make you mine," broke out enough to earn her a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording, and follow-up single "Bittersweet" is now her first Hot 100 appearance. Locket debuted at #10 on this week’s Billboard 200, giving Beer her first top 10 album.

More so than most pop albums, Locket can be divided into tiers: There are the tracks Lostboy produced, and then there's everything else. The producer had his own Dance Pop Recording triumph in 2024, having won with "Padam Padam," and here he gives Beer her own version: "yes baby." The track is absolutely nothing like anything else on the record, even the comparatively muted club chug of "make you mine." Against dark strobing synths, Beer is vocoded into fembot anonymity: the siren in the machine, looking to plug into some dancefloor heat; it reminds me a little of Rihanna on "Where Have You Been," or maybe Nina Sky. Elsewhere, Lostboy adds some PinkPantheress-ish UK garage flourishes to "complexity" and "nothing at all."

The non-Lostboy parts of Locket, meanwhile, are... basically an Ariana Grande album. The tracks are twinkly, light-touch pop-R&B vehicles with a slight lean toward awards-show pomp, with melisma arranged like ribbons around every melody. That's partly out of homage — "Ariana’s obviously always been one of my idols," Beer told Paper — partly because the Wicked series has left an Ariana-shaped void on the charts, and partly because Ariana's sound is just the lingua franca of R&B-leaning pop nowadays. Beer doesn't just nail the sound, though, but the aesthetics too: the lowercase song titling, the coquette styling, and the unbothered thank-u-next poise. Take "angel wings," which makes the emo conceit of "you're dead to me" frilly and flirty, reaching an angelic apotheosis in the line "I guess some ghosts are too damn cute." (Romantasy authors, free idea.) 

Like pretty much every pop artist nowadays, Beer is quick to stress that she's not manufactured — or at least that she's actively participating in manufacturing herself. In interview after interview she volunteers the ways she chimed in on production choices, such as the G.O.O.D. Music-like breakdown at the end of "angel wings." She's framed Locket as a level-up both vocally and lyrically. While most of the vocals are processed, the chorus of "bad enough," a series of brassy exclamations that leap up the scale, is going to be quite the feat to perform on tour. And the come-closer-go-away plaints "for the night" and "you're still everything" do convey authentic-seeming pain. 

What's odd about these interviews, though, is how Beer already sounds like she's moved on from her own era. She told Rolling Stone that she was "closing the chapter" on dance music -- even while that very dance music was still getting play. Reading between the lines, you can sort of guess why: The dark-dance siren songs are thrilling as instrumentals, but Beer sounds a little tentative and uncomfortable inhabiting them, especially in the context of the hypersexualization that still follows Beer around. (I imagine her K/DA role must have been freeing for her: escaping the relentless gaze via a new avatar and new name.) They're also anonymous by nature, which works for an already established megastar like Kylie but is somewhat at cross-purposes to breaking out of a crowd. Yet the tracks that are "more Madison" fade into their surroundings just as much; I challenge anyone who wasn't already a fan to take a random sampling of songs from Locket, Life Support, and Silence Between Songs and guess which track goes with which album. Throw some deep Ariana album cuts into the mix, and I'm not sure even I would score 100%.

How, then, is Beer to break out of the B-list? Does she even want to? She's had a rougher time in the industry than many of her peers, and she's frequently framed Locket as mostly a gift to longtime fans. "Bittersweet" looks like her best bet for a genuine hit in several years, and if it does, it might not have much to do with Madison at all. The inspirational beats, the Walgreens-playlist hooks, and the wordless outro call back to one clear soundalike: Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop the Feeling!" And she didn't even have to star in Trolls.

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