Madison Beer may only be 26, but she is something of a veteran in the pop industry. She got her start at 13, after Justin Bieber tweeted a link to a YouTube video of her covering Etta James’s At Last, and has spent the intervening decade-plus toiling away in mainstream pop, amassing a huge gen Z fanbase in the process – including more than 60 million followers between Instagram and TikTok. It’s an understatement to say that her career has been a slow burn: the day before we speak, it’s announced that her single Bittersweet, released in October, has become her first song to reach the US Hot 100 chart, entering at No 98. When I suggest congratulations are in order, she shrugs off the achievement. “I’m obviously super excited and thankful whenever a song performs well, but I think I’m at the point where I love what I make, and I’m proud of it regardless,” she says amiably, before laughing. “Only took me like, 15 years! But it’s cool.”
Beer’s attitude is indicative of someone whose career has progressed in fits and starts, a far cry from the kind of meteoric rise that fans and onlookers sometimes expect to see in aspirant pop stars. As she prepares for the release of her third album, Locket, she is in prime position to break through to pop’s upper echelon: Her 2023 album Silence Between Songs featured the sleeper hits Reckless and Home to Another One, the latter a sorely underrated Tame Impala-inspired cut, and in 2024 she released Make You Mine, a Top 50 single in the UK which was nominated for a best dance pop recording Grammy.
But those successes, she says, came relatively recently, and she spent many years freeing herself from the idea that things such as charts and awards define an artist. “It was definitely hard for years to detach from that ideology, but I feel so much better off now that that’s not something I drive myself crazy over,” she says. “I don’t want to diss myself here, but I haven’t had No 1s, I haven’t had gigantic songs – actually, that’s not true, I think I have had gigantic songs, but [not] to people’s criteria. I’m like: if I can still sell out a tour and perform for crowds and enjoy it, then clearly I’m OK.”
Beer was raised in Long Island, New York; after that first burst of publicity via Bieber, her family relocated to Los Angeles, where she was signed as a management client by Scooter Braun, Bieber’s then-longtime manager. The early years of her career followed a time-worn format: she recorded tie-in songs for doll brands; collaborated with more established teen idols such as Cody Simpson; and treaded water until it was time to record an album. Beer started working during a transitional phase for the pop industry, when social media was a powerful force that labels still didn’t really know what to do with. She attracted a lot of hate online, as is common for young female stars, and felt wholly unsupported by the infrastructure around her.
“People are so quick to be like: ‘This is what’s wrong with this person,’ and attack someone’s character. The first boyfriend I had [Jack Gilinsky of pop-rap duo Jack & Jack] … I got so much hate from his fanbase and all of these people online. I learned, very early, that people can be quite cruel,” she says matter-of-factly. “I definitely feel protective [of younger stars] and I fear for people. I would hope that people are now like, ‘Bullying a 15-year-old is unacceptable’, whereas when I was 15, that wasn’t really a conversation. I didn’t really feel very protected.”
At 16, Beer was dropped by Braun and her then-label Island Records; in a recent Cosmopolitan interview, she said she felt that Braun and her label “stole years of my childhood that I’ll never get back”. I ask how it’s felt to witness him part ways with clients such as Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, and receive criticism in the press for his acquisition and sale of Taylor Swift’s masters, but Beer sidesteps the topic. “I feel like I’m just at a point in my life where I’m doing my thing, and I’m focusing on my music and my career. I’ve done a lot of therapy, especially regarding those early years, and I’ve really tried to let go of it all,” she says. “Holding animosity, hatred and negativity towards things like that [doesn’t] do me any good. I’ve completely let go of it, and I don’t care. That’s not my issue, not my circus.”
That perspective, and sensitivity to her own emotions, comes to the fore on Locket. The album pairs raw, provocative lyrics with lush, dreamy pop music that sits somewhere between Lana Del Rey and Sabrina Carpenter – the latter of whom is another star who, like Beer, worked for a decade in pop’s trenches before breaking through in her 20s. Beer says she couldn’t have made a record like Locket, which is direct and freewheeling in its approach, without her more introspective sophomore effort. “With Silence Between Songs, I really let people get to know me – that was really what I wanted to get out of that album, whereas with this one, I kind of felt like I didn’t need to go crazy over explaining myself and my story so much,” she says. “I was more so creating music that I loved. It’s a new chapter, it’s a new energy – I’m older, wiser, in a really good place.”
On Silence Between Songs, Beer didn’t “care if it [didn’t] do well, because it’s weird – I’m pulling influence from the Beach Boys, from the Beatles, all these different areas of my life”, she recalls. With this album, she wanted things to be a little more “digestible to my fanbase” – and, as such, the sound fits a more traditional mould; it is, for the most part, a plush R&B record studded with throbbing dance-pop tracks such as Yes Baby and Make You Mine. “With this one, it was more so just like, ‘I want to have fun’.”
Silence Between Songs was released in 2023, after a few difficult years for Beer, during which she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and attracted widespread criticism online for a variety of fairly trivial snafus, including an incident in which she said she “romanticised” the relationship in Lolita, and another in which she was accused of staging photos of herself at a Black Lives Matter protest (which both she and the photographer deny). In 2023 she also released a memoir titled The Half of It, in which she opened up about her struggles with mental health, the sexualisation she experienced as a teenager and much more. Both projects were made out of a desire for fans and more casual observers to see her as human, rather than just another internet celebrity.
“I’ve been online since I was 12, and some people have their minds made up about me – they judge me, which is all OK, I’ve made my peace with that,” she says. “But at the end of the day, I felt with writing a book, at least the people who do want to take the time to get to know me … I [had] to give them an opportunity. I wanted to showcase the truth of things I’ve been through, and show my vulnerability, and hopefully inspire other people. I was at a place where I was like: ‘See me, please, I’m begging you.’ Now that I know the right people have read it and resonated with it, I don’t feel like I need to spend my hours and days sitting online being like: ‘No no, that thing you think about me is not real.’”
Beer’s newfound peace with how people perceive her comes through on Locket, whose lyrics can be disarmingly honest in its assessment of totalising, dissociative infatuation. “Some days I barely respond to my own name,” she sings at one point; at another, “I only exist in the moments you’re talking to me.” Beer dated TikToker Nick Austin from 2020 until spring 2025, and is currently dating the Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert. She says the album chronicles “a pretty up and down, intense relationship” she was in while writing the record. “I feel very deeply, and I get spirally, I guess I could say, and kind of find myself being someone that dwells on things. I’m the kind of person that’s like: if I’m in a fight with my partner, I feel like I literally don’t have a place in the world.”
She continues: “There were times where I would shelter how intense I am – I was like: ‘I don’t want people to deem me crazy or obsessive’, but that’s how I am. When I love, I love fucking hard, and that is the truth,” she says. “I definitely have abandonment issues, attachment issues, I know I have these things that I try to work through, but it’s just my nature of feeling things super deeply.”
Beer’s ability to freely admit her flaws, she says, comes from all the work she’s done on herself in the past decade. “I’ve done every kind of therapy – I’m talking about everything all the time, and I think I’ve come to a point where I can acknowledge these things about me without feeling shame,” she says. “I acknowledge that I am not perfect, and I have my own issues, and I do shit sometimes that I look back on and I’m like: ‘Why did I do that?’ As long as you can do that and work through it, I think it’s OK.”
The downside to writing so openly about a relationship, of course, is that fans will inevitably try to ascribe certain lyrics to certain people, which Beer describes as “a really difficult thing, especially for me”, given how much hate she’s received on social media. “It’s scary for me to release an album like this. It would be pretty easy for me to go online and be like: ‘This is what happened [in my last relationship]’ and I don’t like that. I think that it’s totally inappropriate in regards to people’s privacy,” she says. “I dated this person for a long time, and I don’t want anybody to go and attack them or rip them apart. I don’t wish ill upon literally anybody.”
It seems as if Beer will be able to stand by Locket as a piece of music, beyond any commercial success, critical praise or fan reaction. She’s grafted to get to this place, and won’t likely let it go any time soon. “Those things are out of my control,” she says. “To me, the true meaning of success is being able to feel peace and happiness, no matter what.”
Locket is out now. Madison Beer plays the O2, London, 30 May and Co-op Live, Manchester, 31 May.
