Madison Beer

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. Information about your activity on this service (such as forms you submit, content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (for example, information from your previous activity on this service and other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (that might include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present advertising that appears more relevant based on your possible interests by this and other entities. Advertising presented to you on this service can be based on your advertising profiles, which can reflect your activity on this service or other websites or apps (like the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects. Information about your activity on this service (for instance, forms you submit, non-advertising content you look at) can be stored and combined with other information about you (such as your previous activity on this service or other websites or apps) or similar users. This is then used to build or improve a profile about you (which might for example include possible interests and personal aspects). Your profile can be used (also later) to present content that appears more relevant based on your possible interests, such as by adapting the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find content that matches your interests. Content presented to you on this service can be based on your content personalisation profiles, which can reflect your activity on this or other services (for instance, the forms you submit, content you look at), possible interests and personal aspects. This can for example be used to adapt the order in which content is shown to you, so that it is even easier for you to find (non-advertising) content that matches your interests. Information regarding which content is presented to you and how you interact with it can b