Julyssa Lopez
Contact Julyssa Lopez on X View all posts by Julyssa Lopez March 30, 2026
Cho Gi-Seok* 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, from 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 catalogue. 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.
