Madison Beer decided on the title of her third album before she even wrote the songs. “I wanted it to feel very personal to me and tangible,” the singer-songwriter tells Apple Music’s Travis Mills. “So I wrote down a list of things that felt like they were a part of my life naturally. I really wanted something that was vintage-sounding, something that felt delicate and girly. ‘Locket’ was one of the words that was there from the start.” After heading to the dance floor on previous singles “15 MINUTES,” “make you mine,” and “yes baby” (the latter two of which appear on the album), Beer leans into more acoustic textures and introspective, vocal-highlighting ballads on locket, where she’s a hopeless romantic drifting through a world of whimsy and melancholy. Written in the wake of a breakup, the album cycles through a wide range of emotions and self-doubt, showing that growth isn’t always linear. Where the opening track “locket theme” shows grace and resilience after loss, she addresses an ex on the pastel-hued “angel wings” with more bite: “When I talk about you, I say, ‘Rest in peace.’” The whiplash continues on “for the night,” a guitar-led longing for the bad habit she can’t quite shake. “bad enough,” which weighs the fear of being alone against being unhappy in a relationship, invites scream-singing catharsis with its belting chorus, while “you’re still everything” sits with the quiet devastation of being erased from someone’s life. Even when Beer gets confrontational on the UK-garage-tinged “complexity”—“How can I expect you to love me when you don’t even love yourself?”—she falls into a similar trap of resignation on “nothing at all.” But locket’s centerpiece, “bittersweet,” lets happiness and sadness exist in the same breath. “You know you should be bitter, but you’re bittersweet,” Beer explains. “Meaning you should be angry at this person, but actually you’re like, no, this is for the better, and I’m weirdly okay. I wanted it to feel sad and emotional, but also hopeful. Like you want to be spinning and crying at the same time.” As she tells Mills, releasing songs like ‘bittersweet’ doesn’t reopen old wounds—it heals them: “When I’m onstage singing it and people are singing it back to me, I have a new memory associated with it.”