MARINA’s more than 15-year journey across pop music, ranging from The Family Jewels (2010) and Electra Heart (2012) to 2015’s Froot and then Love + Fear (2019), has never stuck to one thing. Consider the euphonious contrast between a fast and chaotic banger like “Radioactive” and a more subtler pop, slow-burning experience like “Orange Trees” — each, while worlds apart in sound, assist well in their depiction of the MARINA period during which they were released. Yet, amid her evolution, the message of Marina Diamandis’s (f.m.a. Marina and the Diamonds) work has been consistent and synonymous with who MARINA is (in her own words: a “sassy bitch”). Belying these sometimes-exaggerated personae, though, is an emotional wellspring; an ally (see the bubblegum bliss of “Primadonna,” clutched in the hearts of the gays); a mystic (“Purge the Poison,” she says, is her “witchiest” song to date); and an uncompromisingly vulnerable and honest singer.
All facets of her artistry and identity coagulate on MARINA’s new album Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, owed to, as the Welsh singer puts it, “the need to grow.” The new record is both another reflection of its time of creation, a two-year off-season, and a mirror to the 35-year-old’s past. Led by its upbeat title track preaching revolt and disobedience (“You don’t have to be like everybody else / You don’t have to fit into the norm / You are not here to conform / I am here to take a look insidе myself / Recognize that I could bе the eye, the eye of the storm”), it bleeds with the bouncy, familiar aura of earlier MARINA eras like the seminal Electra Heart. But, by this album’s end, there’s a crack in the fun — her voice, on “Flowers” and “Goodbye,” offers flashes of misery fused with hope. Eventually, rebellion concedes. These final songs survive as beautiful conclusions to an album that candidly showcases Diamandis’s embrace of the ebbs and flows of her career and life. “There is no one message, but I would hope that people feel free when they’re listening to it,” she says.
MARINA’s sector of pop is singular but was designed to be populated by her creative kindred — the likes of Ava Max, Kim Petras, girl in red’s recent “You Stupid Bitch,” Ellie Goulding’s hit “Lights,” Charli XCX’s 2017 “Femmebot,” Allie X’s gem “Hello,” and the varied beats of Billie Eilish’s early don’t smile at me EP. Still, it is Diamandis’s distinct vocal resonance and cheeky, enigmatic attitude that’s sustained it. The singer recently teleported us to multiple significant moments in her career that, all told, illustrate her hold on the addicting, disjointed sonic world she’s mothered. It got weird, nostalgic, and — duh — pretty gay.
