Maybe the Insta Baddie is to music what the dumb blonde once was to cinema. Present a certain look and take on a presumed incapacity for self-awareness, substance, or depth.
Still, it’s undeniable that punishing a woman for their beauty still feels terribly reductive. Beer’s debut Life Support buckled under pressure to prove its own legitimacy. Criticised as an overly self-serious record, it bid for vulnerability and washed-up beige. On this record, she makes a more convincing attempt to peel back the curtain onto something more flawed.
Silence Between Songs is the third body of work, following the 2018 EP As She Pleases and Life Support in 2021. She calls her latest project ‘My Story,’ a deceptively simple label that’s accurate. It spans far and delves deep. Fundamentally, this is an introspective record that uses time as its main medium to sift through the landmarks that led to where she is now.
The album is committed above all else to nailing a specific sound. The (many) ballads are carried by rich melodies and a penchant for layered harmonies that float elegantly behind her voice like ribbons. Few come without a dramatic major to minor change somewhere in the second half. Beer is drawing from a wider pallet of styles than ever, from lounge jazz to acoustic and a modern orchestral sound. At best, Beer is attuned to her better instincts; leans into her influences, and trusts that strong lyrics will speak for themselves. The album falters when Beer loses faith in the listener.
Most of the songs are not arresting on a listen. Some take a few revisits for the hooks to set in, while others simply don’t. Tame Impala-indebted lead single ‘Home to Another One’ is instantly gripping, and the best-made track of her career so far. Over a grooving beat, she delivers the cutting line “Call me baby/ I know you go home to another one.” The beat drop of electric guitars in the chorus invokes an instant, sizzling serotonin rush. In fact, the song’s only problem is that it isn’t long enough – Beer misses the chance to deliver an electrifying bridge.
The line “Another year / we’re still here” introduces a recurring thematic focus on the passing of time when things go wrong. The longer she stands in one place, the deeper her loneliness. Beer delivers the vocal performance of the album here. “Did the world stop spinning or did I?” she belts on the chorus, in one of the few vocal moments where she really pushes her foot on the gas.
If the voice on Silence Between Songs is now the real Madison Beer, she is a sensitive person who wants to look forward but cannot help but ruminate on the unresolved. Regret and resentment simmer between the lines on ’17’. Behind its sixties jazz lounge atmosphere, the lyrics leak with mourning for a carefree adolescence lost to immature fame. ’21, it should have been so fun’ she grieves.
‘Reckless’ continues Beer’s self-positioning as a Disney princess, with musical box chimes that feel trite and too on-the-nose. “This is a story I hate,” the song starts, inverting the traditional Once Upon a Time. Subverting a fairy-tale narrative could serve as an interesting framework to portray the bitterly contradictory, and much more complex, truth. But that idea is never fully realised, and it’s unclear across the record if she’s dismantling that narrative or sincerely returning to it.
It’s much more satisfying to see Beer take decisive aim at an enemy, than to position herself as a blinking, hapless victim. She calls out the exploitative label executives who whisked her into a cut-throat industry, and then tried to pigeonhole her into the brand she didn’t ask for. She is scathing, both for herself and other young child stars who were left out in the cold when the shiny toy wasn’t so shiny anymore. “Look what you’ve done, taking advantage of people so young,” she accuses. Unfortunately, the track cheats itself out of catharsis with its unnecessary extra two minutes of run-time.
This tendency to let tracks overstay their welcome starts to make the album’s title seem gratingly appropriate. ‘I Wonder’ and ‘Nothing Matters But You’ are overlong and drowning in self-professed sombreness to the point of feeling shallow; the same problem that underscored Life Support. Beer seems to lose confidence in her lyrics and vocals to get the message through, relying on unnecessary key shifts and new harmonies to control the emotional register.
‘You Showed Me (How I Fell in Love With You)’ interpolates her signature harmonies in the background of a Turtles song, where she tries to understand how a narcissistic ex-boyfriend’s charisma made her fall in love with him anyway. Her peevish admiration for the song’s subject suggests perhaps that she doesn’t see herself the way the world does. “You walk into a room and people fall for you, how I want to be like you.”
The album tends to get weighed down by a fixation on its own introspection, but it’s buoyed by a voice that makes even bland lyrics sound chilling. For all its reflections, it feels like the present stepping of an ongoing journey: of healing, processing, and eventually, moving on.