‘People can be cruel – I learned that early’: US pop star Madison Beer on child fame and fan attacks | music

MAddison Beer may only be 26 years old, but she’s a veteran of the pop industry. She began her career when she was 13, after Justin Bieber tweeted a link to a YouTube video of her covering Etta James’ “At Last,” and has spent more than a decade toiling in mainstream pop music, amassing a massive Gen Z fanbase in the process — including more than 60 million followers between Instagram and TikTok. It’s no exaggeration to say that her career has been slow: The day before we spoke, it was announced that her single “Bittersweet,” released in October, had become her first song to reach the US Hot 100, at No. 98. And when I suggest congratulations are in order, she shrugs off the accomplishment. “Obviously I’m thrilled and grateful when a song does well, but I think I’ve gotten to the point where I love what I do, and I’m proud of it regardless,” she says amiably, before laughing. “Just took me like, 15 years! But it’s great.”

Beer’s attitude is indicative of someone whose career has progressed fitfully, a far cry from the kind of meteoric rise that fans and onlookers sometimes expect to see in aspiring pop stars. As she prepares to release her third album, Locket, she is in a prime position to break through pop music’s upper echelon: her 2023 album Silence Between Songs features the songs Reckless and Home to Another One, the latter a critically underrated Tame Impala-inspired cut, and in 2024 she released Make You Mine, a UK Top 50 hit that was nominated for Best Dance Pop Recording.

But these successes, she says, came relatively recently, and she has spent many years freeing herself from the idea that things like charts and awards define an artist. “It was definitely hard for years to break away from that ideology, but I feel a lot better now because it’s not something that drives me crazy,” she says. “I don’t want to disrespect myself here, but I didn’t get to No. 1, I didn’t get huge hits — actually, that’s not true, I think I… He owns He had giant songs, however [not] To people’s standards. I say: If I can still sell out a tour and perform in front of fans and have fun, then obviously I’m fine.

The beer was raised on Long Island, New York; After that first publicity via Bieber, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she was signed as a managing client by Scooter Braun, Bieber’s longtime manager. The early years of her career followed an old-fashioned format: she recorded songs associated with doll brands. She has collaborated with more established teen artists such as Cody Simpson; He treaded water until it was time to record the album. Beer started out during the transitional phase of the pop industry, when social media was a powerful force, and brands didn’t yet know what to do with it. She attracted a lot of online hate, as is common among young female stars, and felt completely unsupported by the infrastructure around her.

“People are quick to say, ‘That’s what’s wrong with this person,’ and attack someone’s character. My first boyfriend was… [Jack Gilinsky of pop-rap duo Jack & Jack] …I got a lot of hate from his fan base and all these people online. “I learned, very early on, that people can be very cruel,” she says matter-of-factly. “I definitely feel protected [of younger stars] And I fear for people. I wish people would say now, “bullying a 15-year-old is unacceptable,” whereas when I was 15, that wasn’t really a conversation. “I didn’t really feel protected enough.”

At the age of sixteen, Beer was dropped by Brown and her then label, Island Records; In a recent interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, she said she felt that Brown and her brand “stole years of my childhood that I will never get back.” I ask how it felt to watch him part ways with clients like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, and receive flak in the press for acquiring and selling out to Taylor Swift’s masters, but Beer avoids the topic. “I feel like I’m at a point in my life where I’m doing my thing, focusing on my music and my career. I’ve done a lot of therapy, especially around those early years, and really tried to let go of everything,” she says. “He held hostility, hatred and negativity towards things like that [doesn’t] Do me no good. I’ve completely let it go, and I don’t care. “This is not my problem, this is not my circus.”

This perspective and sensitivity to her emotions comes to the fore in Locket. The album combines raw, provocative lyrics with dreamy, soulful pop music that falls somewhere between Lana Del Rey and Sabrina Carpenter — the latter another star who, like Beer, worked for a decade in the pop trenches before making her way in her 20s. Beer says she wouldn’t have been able to make a record like Locket, which is direct and free in its approach, without her introspective sophomore effort. “With the silence between songs, I let people really get to know me — that was really what I wanted to get out of this album, whereas with this album, I kind of felt like I didn’t need to go crazy explaining myself and my story so much,” she says. “I’ve been making the music I love more. It’s a new chapter, it’s a new energy – I’m older, wiser, in a really good place.”

In “The Silence Between Songs”, Bear “didn’t care about that”. [didn’t] “It works well, because it’s weird — I draw influence from the Beach Boys, from the Beatles, and all these different areas of my life,” she recalls. With this album, she wanted things to be more “digestible for my fan base” – and as such, the sound fits a more traditional mold; For the most part, it’s a stately R&B record studded with pulsating dance-pop tracks like Yes Baby and Make You Mine. “With this song, it was more just like, ‘I want to have fun.’”

The Silence Between Songs was released in 2023, after a difficult few years for Pierre, during which she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and attracted widespread criticism online for a variety of rather petty rants, including an incident in which she said she “romanticized” a relationship in Lolita, and another in which she was accused of taking photos of herself at a Black Lives Matter protest (which she and the photographer deny). In 2023, she also released a memoir called The Half of It, in which she opened up about her struggles with mental health, the sex she experienced as a teenager, and much more. Both projects were created out of the desire of fans and casual observers to see her as a human being, not just an internet celebrity.

“I’ve been online since I was 12, and some people have made up their minds about me – they’re judging me, and that’s okay, I’ve made peace with that,” she says. “But eventually, I felt like writing a book, at least for people who wanted to take the time to get to know me… [had] To give them a chance. I wanted to show the truth of the things I went through, show my vulnerability, and hopefully inspire others. I was in a place where I was like, “See me, please, I’m begging you.” Now that I know that the right people are reading it and interacting with it, I don’t feel like I need to spend my hours and days sitting on the Internet saying, “No no, this thing you think about me isn’t real.”

Bear’s newfound peace comes with the way people view her in Locket, whose lyrics can be disarmingly honest in their assessment of both inclusive and dissociative infatuation. “Some days I barely answer my name,” she sings at one point; In another: “I only exist in the moments when you talk to me.” She dated Beer TikToker Nick Austin from 2020 until spring 2025, and is currently dating Los Angeles Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert. She says the album tells the story of an “intense, beautiful relationship” she was in while writing the record. “I feel very deeply, I feel spirally, I guess, and I find myself to kind of be a person who thinks things through. I’m the kind of person who’s like: If I’m in a fight with my partner, I feel like I literally have no place in the world.”

She continues: “There were times when I would hide how nervous I was – I would say: ‘I don’t want people to think I’m crazy or obsessed’, but that’s how I am. When I’m in love, I love having sex very much, and that’s the truth.” “I definitely have abandonment issues, attachment issues, and I know I have those things that I’m trying to work through, but it’s just my nature to feel things very deeply.”

She says Beer’s ability to freely admit her flaws comes from all the work she’s done on herself in the past decade. “I’ve done all kinds of therapy, and I talk about everything all the time, and I think I’ve gotten to a point where I can admit these things about myself without feeling ashamed,” she says. “I admit I’m not perfect, I have my own problems, and I sometimes do bad things when I look at them and wonder: Why did I do that?” As long as you can do it and work through it, I think it’s okay.”

The downside to writing openly about a relationship, of course, is that fans will inevitably try to attribute certain words to certain people, which Beer describes as “a really hard thing to do, especially for me,” given how much hate she’s received on social media. “It’s scary for me to put out an album like this. It would be so easy for me to go online and say, ‘This is what happened.’” [in my last relationship]And I don’t like it. “I think that’s very inappropriate in terms of people’s privacy. I’ve dated this person for a long time, and I don’t want anyone to go and attack them or tear them apart,” she says. “I literally wish no harm on anyone.”

It seems as if Beer will be able to stand alongside Locket as a piece of music, beyond any commercial success, critical acclaim or fan backlash. She’s been indoctrinated to get to this place, and she’s unlikely to leave any time soon. “These things are out of my control,” she says. “For me, the true meaning of success is the ability to feel peace and happiness, no matter what.”

The locket is out now. Madison Beer plays the role of O2London, May 30 and Co-op LiveManchester, May 31.