Aged 13, Madison Beer was fast-tracked to fame when Justin Bieber shared a video of her singing Etta James’s “At Last”. She stood out for her powerful, acrobatic voice and, 13 years later, she still does.
Beer has struggled to find her niche, however, and her third album, Locket, is a 33-minute long pastiche of 2020s pop. She flirts with the Betty Boop-style sexuality of Sabrina Carpenter, the breathy confessionals of Billie Eilish and the fluttering vocal gymnastics of Ariana Grande, but fails to find a sound that’s unmistakably her own.
“Yes Baby” is like a long, animatronic orgasm – sex chat over dance beats – and the result is fake and flat. “Bittersweet” is more successful and it has that lovely quality of feeling familiar on first listen, but its lyrics are clunky: “One day, I’ll wake up sad/But go to bed so glad.”
The album has moments of promise. “Make you Mine” is a hypnotically catchy siren song and “Nothing at All” taps in to something genuinely moving: the realisation that happiness is fickle and success is fleeting. But these are glimmers of artistry in an album that feels repetitive and mass-produced. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect to find playing on loop in a Zara changing room.
Beer is operating in a crowded market. Female artists accounted for two-thirds of number one hits in the UK in 2025. We’re undoubtedly in our “pop girly era” – great if you love a hyper-femme banger, but tough for young singers trying to carve out space. A copy-paste approach can get an artist relatively far, but the breakout stars of the last year (Lola Young, Addison Rae) have followed a different formula: dial up whatever makes you original.
Luckily, we no longer put female artists out to pasture at 30, so 26-year-old Beer has time to find her style. She has all the makings for success: the voice, the looks, the 40 million Instagram followers. In many ways, she’s the perfect pop star. That’s part of the problem. If she wants to stand out, Beer needs to risk getting it wrong.
Locket
Madison Beer
Epic/Sing It Loud
[Further reading: Hamnet fails Shakespeare]
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This article appears in the 21 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe is back
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