Recommendations of the Editorial team
Melanie Martinez has inhabited the darkness since the beginning. At first glance, it might not seem like it – after all, her 2015 debut, “Cry Baby,” enticed with cotton candy-colored artwork and brightly colored pop hooks. But on this surprising debut – at the time, Martinez was best known as the shy but resourceful favorite on “The Voice” – she built a bleak, biting world of family secrets and loss of innocence. Wrapping everything in a pastel, childlike aesthetic, she created the character of a little girl called Cry Baby to convey ghostly tales of suburban melancholy, domestic violence, pill abuse, kidnappings and lasting trauma.
“Cry Baby” spawned more projects and a film, each release as creative as the last — until Martinez veered into the lush forest fantasies of “Portals,” her excellent 2023 album. “Portals” took enormous sonic risks, from the hard-edged production on highlights like “Void” and “Evil,” and also saw Martinez wearing elaborate special prosthetics that she used to transform herself into one in the videos and on the accompanying tour four-eyed fairy nymph. All of this portrayed Martinez as a prolific visionary with a seemingly inexhaustible imagination – and left her fans excited to see what universe she would create next.
But since the world is going to hell right now, why not go straight to “Hades”?
Dystopia under the sign of AI
That’s exactly where we meet Martinez on her new album, a sprawling 18-song compendium that plunges headfirst into the most pressing issues of our time – and is easily the heaviest in Martinez’s catalog. A crisis lurks around every corner, and existential dread creeps in from the first baroque seconds of opener “Garbage.” A ghostly string orchestra promises comfort while gunfire in the background grates on the nerves – a reference to the constant violence and wars exploding all around us. Here, Martinez lays the foundation for a complex, technocratic dystopia centered around a new character she has named Circle.
An audio book that accompanies the album tells the whole story: Circle flees a commune to lead an AI-controlled, bleak pop star existence in a wealth-obsessed desert landscape. Religious hypocrisy and brainwashing are present in the rocking eeriness of “Is This a Cult?”, racism and misogyny in “White Boy Has a Gun,” cyberbullying and body dysmorphia in “Chatroom.” The story itself isn’t particularly compelling; the plot is often difficult to follow, with convoluted moments over an extended running time. But what should we expect when most of us no longer know which way is up and which is down? The real appeal lies in how Martinez finds a new approach to each song without repeating himself. She plays with melodies and song structures, raises her voice on songs like “The Vatican” and sings her way through “Grudges”. The second half of the album loses some of its momentum, but still manages to produce some damn good pop tracks in unexpected ways.
What sets Martinez apart is an inexhaustible supply of ideas – and even in the album’s weaker moments, vision shines through as she unpacks her thoughts on technology and the digital age. This is all the more refreshing given the frequency with which artists these days sacrifice creativity to the algorithm. The end of the story leads to an appeal for human imagination and creativity: “So guard the parts that make you whole before the world takes you” – that’s the last line of the audio book. No matter what apocalypse we are living through, Martinez will survive as a world builder who still has something to say.
