Madison Beer is no stranger to turning heads, but when we meet at a Glendale coffee shop on a windy January afternoon, she's surprisingly anonymous. After the lunching animators sporting matching DreamWorks lanyards clear out of the establishment, the remaining group of elderly Armenian gentlemen at the adjacent table appear to be totally oblivious to the pop star's presence. Truthfully, had I been about 40 years older and enjoying an espresso with my fellow retirees, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash either—except maybe to admire her belted gray herringbone minidress.
For Beer—who is in the midst of rolling out her highly anticipated third studio album, Locket—moments of anonymity like this are few and far between. While this particular group of men may not have recognized the Grammy-nominated Gen Z pop star, it's safe to say their granddaughters would have certainly been starstruck.
Amid the enormity and pressure of this album cycle, Beer quickly defies all the usual tropes of a pop star—feedback she often gets from people she meets outside of the industry. "I have existed as a signed artist longer than I existed not being a signed artist," she calls out. "It's been my normal for a really long time. Fame never came into my life and turned into something that I let consume who I am."
In the throes of her press tour and prep for The Locket Tour, which kicks off in May, Beer is on the precipice of several significant firsts. "When I perform at Madison Square Garden, I'm gonna probably shit myself twice," she laughs. "That's just been my dream for forever." She is notably inquisitive, observant, and down-to-earth. To my shock and horror, she almost immediately clocks that we are from neighboring corners of the tristate area. "It's just an essence, you know?" she says when I press her to reveal my seemingly glaring tell.
Locket, which was released in mid-January, sonically and lyrically communicates the continued complexities of her experience straddling normal life and celebrity, all the while being constantly dissected under a microscope. Whimsical arpeggiation, dreamy chimes, and brutally honest softness in songs like "Bittersweet" and "Bad Enough" juxtapose the electric energy and brash, magnetic confidence of "Yes Baby" and Grammy-nominated "Make You Mine." This contrast, in many ways, mimics the duality of her own experience. Conceptually, Locket feels like a reclamation of a girlhood sabotaged by a system that forced Beer to grow up way too fast.
Considering she's just 26 years old, the longevity of Beer's career is particularly notable. It's also likely why I admittedly cannot place when or where I first became aware of Beer as a public figure, which is something Beer and I laugh at. Apparently, this sentiment has been frequently echoed throughout the years. Instead, she feels like a ubiquitous presence in the industry, yet during our interview week, Beer's single "Bittersweet" debuted at 98 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Locket itself debuted at 10 on the Billboard 200—both firsts in her 14-year career. On the topic of these particular firsts, she's learned to avoid tying her artistic integrity to statistics. "I've kind of come to a point where I'm like, 'I'm okay with or without it. I'm proud of the music with or without it,'" she says.
Her streaming numbers have historically been surprising considering her level of fame. With over 40 million Instagram followers and another 21 million on TikTok, her fan base is massive. In October of 2025, she performed songs off her forthcoming album at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which was streamed live by over 2.5 million viewers. Her music has also consistently remained critically acclaimed with overwhelmingly positive reviews from major publications, even securing Grammy nominations in both 2024 and 2025. Yet her fame seems to precede her, diverting our attention from her impressive and lengthy music career.
She's also received frequent praise from the influential and highly respected fixtures in the industry. In 2023 at the Billboard Women in Music event, Lana Del Rey shouted out Beer alongside chart-toppers Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo as representative of just how far the industry has come for female artists. "She changed me," says Beer, reflecting on the happenstance moment Del Rey approached her at a coffee shop and introduced herself as a fan. "I literally dropped my knees, and I was like, 'Am I hallucinating right now?'"
Even with all the accolades, Beer's inescapable noteriaty as a social media icon feels misguided at best and completely disregards her impressive technical, musical skill. It's a "chicken or the egg" scenario where, in our black-and-white world, it's difficult to trace which came first: internet fame or musical fame. Upon reflection, this is something I, a professional purveyor of internet rhetoric, am also guilty of. It's this erasure of a narrative focused on talent as opposed to marketability that feels like a reflection of the state of celebrity—particularly for women who enter the industry as children.
In many ways, her career has been entirely unprecedented. In 2012, a 12-year-old Beer was inspired by her favorite YouTuber and artist Christina Grimmie to begin uploading covers from the comfort and safety of her Long Island home. "I literally owe my life to her. I wouldn't have posted that YouTube cover if I wasn't inspired by her," she says. It wasn't long before none other than Justin Bieber, who famously got his own start on YouTube, shared one of the preteen's videos, making it go instantly viral. Shortly after, Beer signed a deal with Island Records and was thrust into the incredibly adult world of fame and navigating the emergence of social media as a necessary evil of the entertainment industry without the backing of traditional institutions like Disney or Nickelodeon that have, for better or worse, guided and propelled teenage girls to stardom. Instead, she was thrown into the industry among the grown-ups, where the lines of what should and shouldn't be commonplace for a 12-year-old are murky at best.
Soon, the jarring reality of celebrity began to rear its head, both in her personal life and in the industry at large. Just a few years after Beer posted the YouTube cover that set her career in motion, Grimmie, who was just 22 years old, was shot and killed by an obsessive fan during a meet and greet after an Orlando concert. The tragedy had a significant impact on Beer. "It was beyond devastating," she reflects. "She's, in my opinion, one of the most talented people that ever lived, and I don't think she got the recognition I always thought she deserved." Beer pauses thoughtfully and adds, "I never got to really meet her, and I just… I don't know. I just wish she knew how much I loved her. I feel kind of sad that I never really let her know."
Simultaneously, Beer was being actively hypersexualized by both traditional media and the now all-too-familiar vitriolic internet mob. Beer is undoubtedly striking. Her sharp cheekbones; dark, almond-shaped eyes; and thick, flowing brown hair have drawn attention for the entirety of her career. Even as a teen, she was frequently compared to much older, highly sexualized celebrities of the 2010s, most notably Megan Fox—a comparison she hilariously flips on its head in her 2024 Jennifer's Body inspired music video for "Make You Mine."
After an incredibly traumatizing nude photo leak at the age of 15, Beer was subjected to endless and unrelenting cyberbullying and sex shaming well before she could legally drive, let alone buy a drink. In her 2023 memoir The Half of It, which she wrote hand in hand with best friend and writer Lena Fultz, Beer shares the impact of the experience on her mental health with blistering detail and honesty. After multiple suicide attempts and a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, her success as a musician is a testement to both her resilience and her passion.
With Locket, Beer rewrites her own narrative. Producing alongside frequent collaborators Tim Sommers aka One Love, Lostboy, and Leroy Clampitt, she describes the comfortability and safety that come with a long-term working relationship. "Trust is a big thing for me," she says. "And it's hard sometimes to go into a room with writers you've never met and sit down and be like, 'Here's all my trauma. Let's write a song about it.'" But it's that creative connection that allows her to trust the process.
"When I started it, I had no idea where I was headed," Beer says, explaining that the majority of the tracks on the album came to fruition in a particularly productive three-month span. "It takes a while to take off. That's kind of how I explain it. The beginning feels really slow, and then once it starts working, it's just go, go go."
The songwriting of Locket reflects that trust in its brutal honesty. Beer describes the process of writing what she describes as "the ballad of the album,"You're Still Everything": "I wrote that song in a really vulnerable state and at a time where I felt just totally desperate for someone who I felt like didn't really care at all. The line 'I only exist in the moments you're talking to me' is literally about feeling like I don't have a reason to be here if we're not talking." This candor, as scarily vulnerable as it may be, ultimately pushed Beer to include the song on the album despite the ways it exposes a piece of her she finds complicated.
"Am I ready to openly tell people how I get so attached and how it literally feels like the air is being taken from me when someone is ghosting?" she asks. "But I know so many people can relate, so it feels like [it's] worth doing. I know there's so many people out there, girls like me, that might feel validated. That makes it worth it."
That intimacy is also palpable in the creative direction of the world of the album. Locket opens with a soft winding reminiscent of turning the key of a music box. It instantly transports the listener to a nostalgic, whimsical youth bedroom where an unlocked diary detailing confessions of young love in cursive ink rests abandoned amid gently strewn hair ribbons and lacy baby-doll dresses. "I wanted it to feel both magical and hopeful," says Beer.
As visually rich as the album is in its final form, for Beer, the holistic creative direction of her work never comes to her first. "To me, it's the music first always, and then everything else can fall into place after," says Beer of her process. "I'm really bad at creating something beforehand and sticking to it because then it starts developing, and you're like, 'This is not at all what I thought it was gonna be.' So I don't even do that anymore. I just go in, and I let it take shape. At the start, I had no idea, and then once it started taking form, I could really see the aesthetic, and I could see the colors, and I could see everything just start to come to life in this cool way. But that happens when the music develops."
What most people don't know about Beer is how deeply involved she is in every aspect of her album's conception. Not only is she a cowriter on every song on the album, but she's also a coproducer. From technical instrumentation decisions to music-video direction alongside frequent collaborator Aerin Moreno, Beer remains incredibly hands-on in developing the visual language of the album.
This naturally trickles down to styling. Her vision? Delicate vintage lace corsets; puff-sleeve, fairytale-inspired dresses; and, of course, dainty dangling lockets. She credits her stylist, Harper Slate, with bringing the look to life. "She's just really cool about letting me feel comfortable but then also pushing me where it's necessary and having a clear vision," she says. Beer especially appreciates Slate's direction and describes her personal style as comfort first. "On a normal day, I'm in sweats and a hoodie, and I have no shame about it. I thought that would change when I turned 25, but I'm turning 27 soon and not feeling like it's changing anytime soon," she continues. "I've found what I like, and I think that's really important. I can still look put-together but be comfy. My go-to is just a baggy pair of jeans that feel kind of sweatpant-y and a cashmere sweater and a cool leather jacket."
Beer's affinity for comfort, however, runs deeper than just her wardrobe. As her three-month international Locket Tour approaches, she shares that much of her love for touring has been the product of strong boundary setting that allows her to put her mental health first. Yet over the past decade, this has been met with significant pushback from not just industry executives but also the court of social media. "People have been like, 'If you don't step up and do this, someone else will.' I'm like, 'Cool, then the floor is yours' because I'm not going to be played like a pawn," she says.
She has also taken the wisdom she's garnered from previous stints on the road to make sure the complex logistics of touring support her rather than burn her out. "I love touring, and I'm excited to tour because I've made it so I can do it and love it," she continues. "My last tour was eight months long, which some people are like, 'That's normal.' I'm like, 'Not to me.'" There's nothing normal about that. She hopes that standing up for herself and pushing for better boundaries has a positive effect on the expectations of the industry. "I would love to be someone that people could look to [say], 'Wow, she does a really good job of maintaining a healthy balance between both,'" she adds.
Beer is especially grateful for her longtime fans who have supported her in the moments she has needed to take a step back. "I have a community that's not just going to up and abandon me," she shares. "I know how precious time is, and I feel like I give so much of my life to my career. … I'm good with where I'm at. I'm proud of all my achievements thus far, and if I can maintain a healthy work/life balance, that, to me, is the true epitome of success."
As the baristas begin to close the coffee shop around us and we are suddenly made aware of the time, Beer excitedly shares her leisurely plans for the rest of the day: "I'm literally going home [and] taking a bath." A Pisces through and through. "I have an epic bath, so I'm in the bathroom all the time," she admits. "I'm in the bath, then I'm back in my bed, then I go downstairs and make food. Then I'm like, 'Can I go back in the bath?' And then I go back in the bath." We laugh while comparing step counts, screen times, and our shared love for a day spent entirely horizontal. "Forget the couch. I can't even get to the couch. I'm in bed," Beer concludes. Stars, I sigh, they're just like us.
Talent: Madison Beer
Photographer: Chantal Anderson
Stylist: Gemma Ferri
Hairstylist: Mel Dominguez
Makeup Artist: Cherish Brooke Hill
Manicurist: Analysse Hernandez
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
DP: Sam Miron
Video Producer: Kellie Scott