From the very beginning, Melanie Martinez has dwelled in darkness. Maybe on the surface it didn’t seem that way, given the cotton-candy-colored artwork and sugary pop hooks of her first album, 2015’s Cry Baby. Yet on that surprising debut, Martinez — then best known for her short stint as a shy but inventive favorite on The Voice — built a bleak, biting world of family secrets and a loss of innocence. She tucked everything in a pastel, childlike aesthetic, creating the character of a little girl named Cry Baby to tell haunting stories of suburban melancholia, domestic abuse, pill-popping, kidnappings, and ever-lasting trauma.
Cry Baby spawned off more projects and a film, each release as creative as the last, until Martinez swerved into the lush forest fantasies of Portals, her excellent LP from 2023. Portals took tons of sonic risks, including the serrated production of standouts like “Void” and “Evil,” and also saw Martinez adopt full-on specialized prosthetics as she transformed into a four-eyed fairy-nymph creature in the videos and accompanying tour. All of it served as a testament to Martinez as a prolific visionary with no shortage of imagination, and it left fans curious about what universe she’d dream up next.
But since the world is going to hell, why not go to Hades?
That’s where we find Martinez on her latest album, a sprawling compendium of 18 songs that plunge straight into the most daunting topics of our time — and easily the heaviest in Martinez’s catalog. Crisis is at every corner, and existential dread starts creeping in from the first baroque seconds of the opener, “Garbage.” A haunting string orchestra promises to pacify the listener, all while gunshots in the background tug at the anxieties of constant war and violence detonating all over us. This is Martinez setting up a complex, technocratic dystopia, starring a new character she’s invented named Circle.
An audiobook that accompanies the album tells the whole story: Circle escapes a commune to become a pop star consumed in a barren, wealth-obsessed AI wasteland. There’s religious hypocrisy and brainwashing on the seesawing eeriness of “Is This a Cult?,” racism and misogyny on “White Boy Has a Gun,” cyberbullying and body dysmorphia on “Chatroom.” The story itself isn’t super concise; the plot is often hard to follow, with convoluted moments across a drawn-out run time. But what would you expect when most of us can’t figure out which way is right side up anymore? The thrill here is seeing Martinez find a new way into every song without repeating herself. She plays with melodies and song structures, pitching up her voice on songs like “The Vatican” and talk-singing her way through “Grudges.” The second half of the album loses some of its momentum, but she still finds interesting ways to deliver some damn-good pop tracks.
What Martinez has is a bottomless supply of ideas — and there’s perspective and insight as she navigates her thoughts on technology and the digital age, even on the weaker moments of the album. It’s even more refreshing, given the frequency at which artists seem to throw their hands in the air and sacrifice creativity to an algorithm. The end of the story lands as an appeal for human imagination and creation: “So guard the parts that make you whole before the world takes you,” the final line of the audiobook reads. No matter what apocalypse we’re living through, Martinez will survive as a world-builder with something left to say.
