Marina Is Back and Better Than Ever, Even Without the Diamonds
A little more than two years ago, pop artist Marina Diamandis, then performing under the moniker Marina and the Diamonds, felt like she was ready to quit the music industry for good.
In the wake of her critically lauded third album Froot and its accompanying Neon Nature Tour that sold out dates across Europe, North and South America, Marina began prepping for a follow-up that didn’t seem to go anywhere. Between heading to Los Angeles for a writing trip and wrestling with various uncertainties in her professional and personal lives, Marina felt she had reached the end of her artistic road.
“I just didn’t feel comfortable anymore standing behind this Marina and the Diamonds project. I think I hadn’t realized how much of my sense of self was associated with my work as an artist,” Marina says. “It was strange to be at 31 thinking, Okay, I’m allowing myself to quit and not going to feel guilty about it anymore, but what am I going to do for the rest of my life? How can I be of service or purpose to the world?”
Marina pauses, trying to wrap her head around a period she says she still has trouble talking about in a clear way. “I just literally didn’t see the point in life. I didn’t understand what life was about.”
Relaxing on a couch in an Anthropologie sweater at Atlantic Records’s Midtown office, Marina is feeling the best she has in a long time when we meet up on a snowy New York morning in March. It’s bizarre for her now to think about a time in her life when she didn’t want to make music, especially as she preps for this month’s release of her fourth studio album, aptly titled Love + Fear, which she will be releasing as simply Marina.
“I definitely felt very depressed and didn’t understand why life was good, literally functioning day-to-day thinking, Just get through today,” Diamandis says before an unexpected burst of laughter. “It’s so hilarious now because I feel so centered, connected, and grounded.”
Half Welsh and half Greek, Marina was raised in a tiny Welsh village called Pandy with just under 2,000 residents. Growing up, she idolized the likes of Britney Spears and Madonna, finding herself drawn to the campiness and character of pop music. “I don’t really like meandering songs, but love organization and structure, so my love of pop is more to do with the form than the artist,” she elaborates.
Her rise to popularity with Marina and the Diamonds was marked by a tireless work ethic that saw her taking every possible shot—including an infamous anecdote in which she responded to an ad from Virgin Records that was trying to put a boy band together by showing up to the audition in drag and getting turned away at the door. Other auditions for various girl groups and touring productions didn’t pan out, but Marina eventually caught the attention of Warner Music Group when she uploaded her self-made GarageBand demos to MySpace. After getting signed in October 2008 to Neon Gold Records, Marina’s music industry It-girl status was cemented once she came in second on BBC’s Sound of 2010 list behind Ellie Goulding.
Her debut album, The Family Jewels, came out shortly afterwards and quickly went gold, with pop oddities like “Mowgli’s Road” and “Are You Satisfied?” diving into heady themes like mass commercialism and the seductive power of the entertainment industry. (Lyrics from her breakout single “Hollywood”: Hollywood infected your brain / You wanted kissing in the rain / Living in a movie scene / Puking American dreams / I’m obsessed with the mess that’s America.)
Marina is quick to point out how rare it was for her, as a female artist signed to a major label, to retain so much creative control when crafting such offbeat material. “I think [during] the first album, I was just learning. I wasn’t doing anything with a particular plan in mind except that I knew people were expecting a lot of me,” she says. “That was kind of my most commercial album, but in my head I hadn’t done well enough, so I made Electra Heart.”
Released as a follow-up to The Family Jewels in 2012, Electra Heart was Marina’s attempt at transitioning from buzzy-pop ingenue to chart-topping superstar, and it replaced the gritty charm of her debut with a bubblegum-pop aesthete that might have lost her as many fans as it helped her gain. Although Diamandis assures me she doesn’t hate the concept album, as many in her fan base seem to believe, she considers it as part of a period in which she was still trying to navigate exactly what she wanted her career to look like.
“At the time it wasn’t cool to be pop; there was still very much a ‘guilty pleasure’ aspect about listening to pop artists,” she says. “It was a post-Libertines, indie-rock era, and I was very much living in that environment. If I dared do a gig to an instrumental or backing track, it was like, ‘Oh, my God, she’s so fake and constructed.’”
It follows that Marina’s third effort, Froot, was everything Electra Heart wasn’t. Written entirely by Diamandis and coproduced with one other person, both a rarity in pop, Froot was Diamandis’s attempt at reclaiming a sense of control over her career. “The release of Froot was literally like an emotional release for me as well because I was doing something on my own terms. Having recognition and support for that felt really, really amazing,” she says. “But I also think the flip side to that emotion or feeling is then feeling like, ‘Oh, okay, I guess I achieved everything I’ve wanted to.’”
In many ways, Froot was a resounding success, garnering Marina the best reviews of her career and becoming her first top-10 album on North American charts. But between grueling professional obligations paired with personal issues that persisted in the wake of Froot’s release, Marina was starting to feel the pressure.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy being on tour, it was just circumstantial things,” Marina assures. “There were so many things going on that made me think, Why are all these things happening at once? I couldn’t catch a breath.”
In the wake of her aforementioned decision to take a break from music potentially forever, Marina sought a sense of purpose outside of music. It was only when she went back to university to study psychology for six months that she found the first non-musical outlet for her creative curiosity. It was a theory by Elisabeth Kubler Ross she came across that ended up inspiring the title of her new album: “There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety, and guilt.”
Love + Fear is the title of the two eight-track collections coming out this month, the first part of which, Love, surprise-dropped on April 4. Part of that new beginning meant transitioning from Marina and the Diamonds to simply Marina, reflecting a shift away from her former pop persona. Working with a limited number of producers and writers, Marina ultimately assembled a record that would grow to reflect her state of mind of these past few years. A big part of that included falling in love with her current boyfriend, Jack Patterson from the band Clean Bandit, with whom Marina collaborated with on the album track “Baby.” After the collection’s release this month, Marina will immediately embark on the Love + Fear U.K. Tour through May with a slight break before resuming with a U.S. leg in the fall. She’s even flirting with the idea of rerecording her “scratchy, GarageBand singles” of fan favorites like “Simplify” and “Bad Kids” for an official demos album, although there are no concrete plans yet.
The shift in Marina’s sound is immediately apparent on the album’s opening track, “Handmade Heaven,” a hauntingly elegant ode to an untouchable paradise. Don’t worry though, Marina assures me: She didn’t set out to make an album that would soundtrack, as she says Twitter stans refers to it, “‘sad bitch’ hours.”
“When I gave Love + Fear to my friends, they were like, ‘Oh, my God, I thought it was going to be so sad,’ but it’s not!” she says. “It’s more than talking about just love and fear, it’s more about that kind of existential feeling of purpose and love and feeling fear in relationships. There’s lots of different topics on there, and there’s bops.”
There is certainly a lot happening at once for someone who has spent the past three years out of the public eye, but Marina has been emboldened by her time away. “I appreciate that I have this job and can make money from it and contribute to culture, but it’s not my whole life anymore. I love music, but I really come from a place of feeling like I have nothing to lose, and I think that’s healthy,” she says. “I’m here because I want to be here and not because a fourth album was due, because I’m not someone to go through the motions. If I didn’t do music, there are so many other things I could do.”
