On locket, Madison Beer finally finds her footing and is ready to dance

Now, though, Beer is perhaps finally ready to cut loose and dance. locket, the singer’s third album, is underscored with a playfulness that’s long been absent from Beer’s work. You can see it in how sonically diverse the album is, with Beer finally stepping away from the sleepy slo-fi pop of Life Support and Silence Between Songs and instead tapping into a wide collage of inspirations to craft pop confection after pop confection. Dark siren synth-pop bangers “yes baby” and “make you mine” are satellited in from an alternate universe where Depeche Mode was tapped to produce the Jennifer’s Body soundtrack, Beer singing with all the casual sultriness of someone who eats boys for breakfast. Twinkly 90s r&b bedroom hit “angel wings” finds Beer crackling with mordant wit, picturing how she’ll get over someone by pretending they’re dead, complete with angel wings. “complexity,” pinging with garage breakbeats and glitchy 8-bit bleeps, nods to Beer’s love for video games and shows like Adventure Time. (Beer has previously worked on music for League of Legends.) And “for the night” is a booty-call yearner reimagined as a 60s crooner jam. Tell me all this doesn’t just sound like someone having fun in the studio.

And with more fun comes more focus, too. While Beer’s albums have often suffered in the past from having handfuls of good ideas but not enough concentration to turn those ideas into, well, songs, locket feels far more rigorous and composed. (Compare locket’s 11-song tracklist to Life Support’s 17.) Here, Beer’s music has the space to grow and expand, and it’s satisfying to watch how it builds—take, for example, the way “angel wings” mutates at the end into a distorted, zombified outro, as if the song had been vacuumed into a nocturnal underbelly of desire. locket also finds Beer taking greater advantage of her vocal talents: lush, ambitious layering and harmonizing appear throughout the album, and she has never sounded stronger than on the chorus to “bad enough,” where her powerhouse vocals just slam through the stratosphere as she despairs over being unable to let a toxic relationship go.

Of course, it’s not like the pain that defined the past has simply shot off and vanished into the ether. “nothing at all,” locket’s closer, feels most like a spiritual sister to Beer’s earlier work: the track begins as a slow ballad about finding one’s way through life’s disappointments (“The higher you rise, the further that you fall”), until garage breakbeats start whispering under the plaintive piano. Beer soars over the arrangement, yet right at the moment when the chorus flies highest—when redemption from pain, one would hope, is just around the corner, finally on offer—Beer’s voice breaks apart in a shatter of AutoTuned glitches and breakbeats. Salvation is never that straightforward, the track seems to posit. But in the meantime, all you can do is dance.

Lydia Wei is a writer based in DC. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Pitchfork, Washingtonian, Washington City Paper, and elsewhere. Find her online at lydia-wei.com.