REVIEW: Bea Miller Finds the Funny Side of Falling Apart on ‘Mr. Peaked in High School’
WRITTEN BY MATILIA
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Photo Courtesy of °1824
There’s something extraordinarily strange about looking back on a period everyone else might consider one of the best times of your life and remembering mostly how miserable you were.
Bea Miller knows that feeling better than most. Her career took off when she was still a teenager, but the version of those years visible to the public and the one she was actually living were never quite the same. On Mr. Peaked in High School, her first full-length album since 2018, Miller finally has enough space from that time in her life to do something she couldn’t have done back then: laugh at it.
The joke is built into the title. Miller sings, “I’m Mr. Peaked in high school, but I never even went” on the opener “born to lose,” giving a sarcastic name to the fear that her biggest success came too young. She was working while other teenagers were going to school, and the success that came with that work did not translate into a particularly happy adolescence.
During a recent °1824 press conference, when Life on Jupiter asked whether the disconnect between her public success and private experience sits at the center of the album, Miller admitted that it does—although not in a way she had consciously considered while making it.
“I guess I’m saying I peaked in high school, but I’m really only talking about my career because my personal life certainly wasn’t peaking,” she said. “I was really fucking miserable.”
Miller recalled living in Huntington Beach at 14, commuting as much as an hour and a half each way to Los Angeles with her mother for work and rarely seeing friends her own age. She described herself during that period as “extremely lonely and alienated,” which makes the nostalgia running through Mr. Peaked in High School much more complicated than simply wishing she could go backward. The past isn’t presented as some perfect place she lost, yet still, she sometimes misses it anyway.
“summer of ’16” leans directly into that mix of nostalgia and discomfort. This track sees Miller begging to indulge her “nostalgia spree,” missing a time when everything felt more dramatic and instantaneous even though the memories she’s romanticizing weren’t exactly carefree, either.
Elsewhere on the album, she misses being a teenager while simultaneously writing about how unhappy she was as one. The contradiction acts as a continuous reminder that nostalgia doesn’t require the past to have actually been better; sometimes enough time passes that the ugliest parts start to catch a little light and the mess starts to feel almost golden.
The ability to revisit difficult experiences without being swallowed by them seems crucial to why this album exists now. Miller told Life on Jupiter that talking about painful memories used to make her feel horrible all over again, but these days, she feels removed enough from them—and happier enough in her present life—to approach those same experiences “from kind of a funny lens.” That shift is prominent throughout the record.
However, the humor doesn’t make Mr. Peaked in High School emotionally shallow. If anything, it allows Miller to be more direct. Depression, loneliness, bad coping mechanisms, fear of aging, casual sex, self-sabotage and the exhausting awareness of her own bad habits all show up without much effort to make any of it sound graceful. “depressed on the internet” openly pokes at the weirdness of turning mental health into content while doing exactly that. “bad person” asks whether repeatedly making terrible choices eventually says something terrible about the person making them. “pretty and alone” turns wanting affection into a joke about being hot enough that somebody really should be texting back.
The running gag is often Miller herself. She’s not standing outside these problems offering wisdom now that she’s inspirationally overcome them. A lot of what keeps the record from feeling self-serious is how readily Miller makes herself the punchline.
That makes some of its heavier observations sneak up on you. “sex for ATTENTION” is funny on the surface until the humor wears thin enough to reveal someone accepting intimacy she doesn’t really want because loneliness feels worse. “unloveable” similarly jumps between family history, failed relationships and jokes about having plenty of free time until death. There’s a recurring question underneath much of the record about what happens when you understand your own patterns perfectly well but understanding them still doesn’t magically make you stop.
And then, unexpectedly, love complicates Miller’s cynicism.
“take you with me” finds someone who once considered romance embarrassing suddenly wanting shared milkshakes, birthdays and all the other sentimental things she would have rolled her eyes at before with the person she loves. And within an album so preoccupied with everything that’s gone wrong, the song matters because it shows that Miller hasn’t actually written herself into permanent pessimism. For all her cynicism, Miller still findsroom for wanting something softer.
“past my prime” pushes that idea further by questioning all the milestones she thought she should have hit by now. Miller thought she would own a house by now. Maybe have a spouse. Instead, she’s still asking whether being 25 somehow means she’s already run out of time. The anxiety is specific to her, but the logic behind it is painfully common: there’s always some imaginary schedule everyone else appears to be following more successfully.
But of course, the album refuses to stay miserable for long. It closes with “PARTY,” which responds to financial anxiety, environmental dread and general hopelessness with what is probably the least responsible solution available: throw a party anyway. It’s not optimism exactly, but something closer to a moment of looking around at everything that feels impossible to fix and deciding that despair doesn’t deserve to take up whatever time remains.
That ending suits Mr. Peaked in High School impeccably. Miller doesn’t emerge with her past resolved, adulthood mastered or some grand lesson about how everything happens for a reason. She mostly seems relieved that she can finally talk about all of it without being dragged back into the person she was when it happened.
During the press conference, Miller wondered whether some cruel trade is happening between the different parts of her life: her career thrived when she was personally miserable, while now her relationships and friendships feel better after several professionally difficult years. She would, understandably, prefer to have both.
But Mr. Peaked in High School does offer evidence that those years weren’t her only peak. The teenager she remembers as isolated and angry couldn’t have made this record from this perspective. The jokes require distance, the honesty requires safety and even the nostalgia requires being able to separate the memories she wants to hold onto from the ones she’s glad are over.
By the end of Mr. Peaked in High School, Miller hasn’t reclaimed some lost version of herself or solved every problem she drags through the record. She just sounds less afraid of looking directly at them. That may be the real difference between who she was then and who she is now—the past can still hurt, embarrass her or make her laugh, but it no longer gets to definewho she is.