Album Review: Agnes – Beautiful Madness
3 min read
Agnes has always occupied a fascinating space in pop — a Swedish star who first broke through as a teenage Idol winner before steadily reshaping herself into a sleek, club-facing artist with real staying power. Over the years, she’s moved far beyond talent-show origins, building a reputation for dramatic vocals, disco influences, and a flair for reinvention. Beautiful Madness, released via Universal Music Sweden, continues that journey. Arriving as her sixth studio album, it follows a period of creative independence where Agnes has spoken about wanting to make music that feels instinctive rather than calculated. The title itself hints at that balance she’s long played with — control versus chaos — so let’s see if she can push her identity forward in a way that resonates with the listener.
Beginning with the brief and weirdly named, but celestial-sounding BM-247 01 INTERLUDE, we move into the heavy beats of BEAUTIFUL MADNESS, which is all about the apt minimal vocals meshed with thumping beat, then onto the poppy (is it too easy to make a Gaga comparison?) TRIGGER… which is followed by a GOT ANY? interlude, before landing on released track MILK – which feels like she’s drawing on the non-commercial 1970’s disco meshed with a more Daft Punk/Cassius French funky house vibe… perfect cardio session gym music. A further FOCUS short break track, followed by WAKE UP – an uplifting track with simple lyrics, whilst BALENCIAGA COVERED EYES is a deeper track, both lyrically and musically, with a very Italian, late 1990’s house track vibe… which totally works.
Distorted auto tune on the vocals in the short NOT CAPABLE lead to EGO, which is probably the big track of the album (though for me not as good as BEAUTIFUL MADNESS or MILK), which has all the hallmarks of a synth-pop megahit. Eleven seconds of MASTERPIECE moves swiftly into the deep house beats of SIGN IT, which is another strong track, with a great vocal pitch change midway though. Final short interlude PRE leads us to the penultimate LOVESONGS, which is the closest this album has to a slower ballad of a track, with a very familiar beat entering, but not dominating the track, leaving us with UTERUS & UNIVERSE to close proceedings – a slowed down beat with a ‘sun coming up after being up the whole night’ feel to it, this track is possibly my favourite… it just has a good low key synth arrangement that works well with her vocals.
Beautiful Madness was much better than I thought it was going to be … I’d go so far as to say it was a good, grown up synth/club-pop album with good diversity of tracks whilst all falling in the same loose genre. I can see a few of the better tracks finding its way to the dancefloors and Agnes getting a lot of traction when she does tour the UK. There are a few decent tracks, and I will be adding UTERUS & UNIVERSE & MILK to my 2026 favourites, even though this isn’t really in my musical sweet spot… but if you’re into vocal-heavy pseudo-club music, you will love this, start to end!
