Madison Beer knew her third album would be called Locket long before she even really dug into making it. After wrapping her most recent tour last fall, she was ready to dive into a new project, and this time around, the title felt important to her. She wanted it to feel authentic to who she is as an artist, perhaps an item or a word that felt tangible.
“I was in my Notes app for weeks on end just writing words I related to,” she says over the phone in early October. “I just kept on gravitating towards [Locket] every single time I would read the list.”
The word became a north star for Beer and her collaborators before they even got back into the studio. They would listen to songs or exchange ideas and say things like “This is so Locket” or “Locket-core.”
As she describes it, both the album and the accessory it’s named after feel like a vessel for her memories. Locket holds all the experiences she’s had that make the project what it is now.
“Each song contains things that are in my locket that I carry around with me,” she says.
Nostalgia runs deep in Beer’s new music. She wanted to return to the pop sound of her early releases and looked toward early favorites including Ariana Grande, SZA, and Gwen Stefani for inspiration. But Locket’s pop return comes with a growing confidence in her talent, thanks to successful experimentations with her sound and lyricism on recent releases like 2023’s more introspective Silence Between Songs.
“[Silence] really was a definitive moment for me because I was nervous about releasing an album that was extremely personal and very lyrically driven with more acoustic, slower stuff,” she says. “It really wasn’t a pop album at all. I was scared because I was like, ‘Is this not what people want from me?’ And then I was like, ‘This is what I want, and this feels really good to me. So why don’t I just do it?’”
Fans were more than accepting of her new direction. At the shows, they sang back every word, even for deeper album cuts like “Nothing Matters But You.” Before going on tour, however, she wanted to make a big dance-pop moment to keep the energy high at the shows. So she took another detour, crafting the delicious EDM-pop moment “Make You Mine” as a one-off single. It was so well-received that it was nominated for Best Dance Pop Recording at the 2025 Grammy Awards.
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“It truly was made just for the tour,” she says. “I didn’t have any expectations for that song other than for my fans who are already attending my tour.” After the song’s success, she crafted two more big dance-pop moments in the vein of “Make You Mine,” including “15 Minutes” and Locket lead single “Yes Baby.”
“‘Yes Baby’ is kind of the finale of that,” Beer says. “Not the finale in the sense of me never going to make another dance song again, but I close that [chapter] for now. I’m returning a little more to my roots.”
The songs from Locket don’t lose the energy of her dance-pop period, even if they don’t go as maximalist as those tracks. Beer returned to the studio with some of her frequent collaborators, including Tim “One Love” Sommers, who worked on her debut EP As She Pleases when Beer was 18 and just getting started.
“I’ve been working with these people for so long, so it’s been really cool for us all to really grow together,” she adds.
One area of personal growth she really wanted to showcase on Locket is her voice. After her most recent tour, she noticed the comments people made about how much better her vocal performance was live in comparison to the studio recordings, especially of her older songs. She wanted to write bridges that were more vocally impressive, and to push herself further in the booth.
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“There’s one song that is very vocally challenging,” she says, remaining coy about the track list ahead of Locket’s Jan. 16 release date. “When I recorded this one song and I still had Twitter, I tweeted ‘Oh my God, I literally don’t know if I’m gonna be able to speak for a week.’ That was a feeling that I really enjoyed with this album. I really liked my desire to push myself and see what I was capable of. So I hope people like the vocals on this project because we spent a lot of time doing it.”
Beer noticed on tour that the songs where she pushed herself vocally were her favorites to perform, too. She brings up the Silence Between Songs track “Nothing Matters But You” again as an example of a moment during the live show she would look forward to the most.
“[Singing] is my gift and the thing I cherish the most. I should be feeling that way about every song,” she adds, while admitting she definitely does not feel that way about her entire set list. “I won’t name names. I don’t want to be mean to any other songs, but there’s a couple songs that I would perform and honestly be so bored and feel like I literally can’t do anything, like I’m just essentially sleeping.”
She took that realization and brought it to the studio with her. But making more vocally-driven songs wasn’t the only lesson she’s gotten from touring. For Beer, being on the road tends to be great for her own self-confidence and mental health. The reality of the shows where thousands of fans pay for tickets and sing back her songs to her made her want to get offline fully.
“I get a good amount of hate on the internet and I think that that all becomes irrelevant when you’re looking out at a sold-out crowd,” she says. “That has been a very, very helpful tool for me in my life. How could I let a tweet destroy my day when I’m performing for 5,000 people who bought tickets and know the music?”
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With the noise blocked out, Beer made Locket with a feeling of total freedom. It reminded her of when she made her debut album, Life Support, a concept album she wrote during a depressive episode. She noticed the songs came together more quickly, with most of the track list they settled on being written in the first three months of working on it. She spent months after that trying to top what she had already made, realizing that her first instinct was still her best.
“When I listen to my gut, it usually turns out better and it’s something that I’m more proud of,” she says. “In this industry, the proof is in the pudding. You need to earn your stripes to be able to say ‘No, I know what I’m talking about.’”
