Twelve years into her career, it’s hard to imagine that Marina Diamandis was once a MySpace artist marketed as a quirky Britpop-ish act. Her whole career is so thoroughly of these times. She was fan-forward from the beginning; her original stage name, Marina and the Diamonds, made her fans part of her persona as the eponymous gems, and they rewarded her with devotion. She made just-outside-the-mainstream pop before such music was the Spotify-playlist default; she studded her lyrics with light social commentary when that was still somewhat rare on the Top 40 charts.
Through it all, Marina’s musical persona has remained unmistakable: dramatic, theatrical, her heart worn not just on her sleeve but in a shiny, spangled, and wide-open frame. Her voice spans throaty lows to fluting highs; her lyrics are forthright and low-irony, for better and worse. As an acting coach might say, she’d rather be big and wrong than tiny and right. (From an acting coach, this is a compliment.) But her music has morphed over time, thanks to a series of fast-replaced collaborators: pre-disgrace Dr. Luke and his unsubtle sound on Electra Heart; relative unknown Faultline producing more muted work on Froot; a veritable songwriters’ camp on Love + Fear; several Clean Bandit features during a short-lived EDM phase. Marina has expressed unease about the shifts—Electra Heart made her feel “kind of ashamed, like this isn’t really who I am,” she told The New York Times, while the lower-key Froot made her fear she wasn’t ambitious enough. Her unease is understandable: She is thoroughly herself, in front of so many green screens.
Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is Marina’s boldest music yet. She wants you to know it from the first seconds of the title track: a glam schaffel beat that Marina turns into her own personal pulpit. She swoons and evangelizes and delivers rapidfire hooks—the big one shares a melody with “Womanizer,” but as hooky pop hits go, you could nick far worse. “Venus Fly Trap” might not much say much that Marina hasn’t already said on 2010’s “Hollywood,” but the song is far more brash—it sounds carnivorous—and Marina casts herself not as an outsider gawking at the town, but a star victorious over it: “Why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus fly trap?” She sought out female producers for the album, most prominently Jennifer Decilveo (Bat for Lashes, Beth Ditto)—which shouldn’t be noteworthy, except they’re so rare in the pop industry that in 12 years, Marina has only worked with a handful. Chalk it up to creative synergy, but there’s a muscle to Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land that she’d missed for quite some time.