'It's a shame we don't cherish her': Marina, British pop's nearly woman

For the last decade, Marina – formerly Marina and the Diamonds – has sat on the precarious fence between mainstream and underground pop: someone with that curious, 21st-century kind of fame where you can rack up tens of millions of streams without ever having a Top 10 single. The Welsh native’s first solo work in four years, Handmade Heaven, was released last Friday – can it finally be the song to give her universal appeal?

Peter Robinson, editor of the influential pop music site Popjustice, says Marina excels in a particular manner: while “certain music comes in and out of fashion, it’s a rare artist who does exactly what they want to a high standard”. He describes her as “one of the top three British artists – it’s a shame we don’t cherish her more.”

With every album Marina, now 33, has offered a different persona, focus and tone, attracting and dismaying fans and critics with each change. Her first album, The Family Jewels, in 2010, was written mainly by her – rough around the edges but unapologetically honest and autobiographical. It had a range of styles, from two ethereal piano-driven tracks, Obsessions and I’m Not a Robot, which address OCD tendencies and social isolation, to songs with poppier aspirations discussing wider societal issues. Take a look at the song Girls: “Girls are not meant to fight dirty / Never look a day past 30 / I’ll never bend over and curtsey for you”: assertive, sarcastic lyrics backed by spine-chilling synthesisers and haunting laughter.

This strikingly stylised voice contrasted starkly against the tedious ballad singers who had begun dominating the charts, such as Adele and Sam Smith. The album earned her second place in BBC’s Sound of 2010 after Ellie Goulding, and granted Marina her most successful single to date, Hollywood, peaking at No 12.

Marina’s lyrics made it very clear that from the beginning, she had even greater aspirations. In the opener, Are You Satisfied?, she sings: “They say I am a control freak / Driven by a greed to succeed”, a message she repeats – perhaps ironically – on Oh No: “Don’t do love, don’t do friends / I’m only after success”.

She later said she held out for six months before finally accepting all the commercial help her record company offered her on next album, Electra Heart – from big pop producers such as Dr Luke (Katy Perry), Stargate (Rihanna) and Shellback. She developed a new, theatrical persona called Electra, complete with a blond wig, long eyelashes and pink bows to comment on female archetypes. In Primadonna, Electra sings in a childlike voice: “Would you do anything for me / Buy a big diamond ring for me”. In Bubblegum Bitch, she’s more assertive: “Queentex, latex, I’m your wondermaid / Life gave me some lemons so I made some lemonade / Soda pop, soda pop, baby, here I come / Straight to No 1”. Which is exactly where the album went. The trouble was that Marina, as she later said, was so uncomfortable with the album that “when I look at [Electra Heart], I feel like it’s somebody else.”

It just didn’t suit her: Lana Del Rey could pull off the tragic, toxic heroine much more effectively, combining nostalgic glamour with 20th-century Americana in a singular focused image. Marina’s persona – self-aggrandising yet coquettish – complicated the mix; trying to portray a female character who is defined by the male gaze made any self-identification confusing. She said: “I felt like I was being pushed into it”, and told the Oxford Union: “I hated how there was an expectation for your individuality to be ironed out in order to succeed … I was working in the wrong place.”

How refreshing it was, then, when she returned in 2015 to write all the tracks for her third album Froot, herself, and with a more mature and self-aware approach. Some of the song names alone – Happy, Forget and Can’t Pin Me Down – show her new attitude. In Gold, she even addressed how misperceived she was in the pop industry: “They don’t seem to understand who you are / It doesn’t matter as long as you are a star.”

Rolling Stone magazine criticised her “superfluous songs and cringey lyrics” and interpreted her lyrical commentary on Savages as “misanthropic” and Better Than That as “slut-shaming”. But it wasn’t all bad. As Caroline Sullivan wrote in her review for the Guardian: “If you allow yourself to be swept into her world, it’s an intriguing place”, even though “this has yielded a record of intense highs and lows, and a range of styles that don’t always join up well.” Commercially, it was her lowest performing album in the UK, although it went to No 8 in the US.

While still lacking cohesion – and a killer hit – Froot was the work of a woman brimming with confidence. This has continued, as she changed her name in late 2018 from Marina and the Diamonds to just Marina. This self-assertion was clear even in the song Hollywood from her first album, whose lyrics relayed a joking exchange: “Oh my god, you look just like Shakira / No no, you’re Catherine Zeta / Actually, my name’s Marina.” After years of being pulled between different versions of herself, the name change suggests she’s now more focused than ever.

That’s not to say she is against collaboration. Despite saying in a 2015 BBC article that “co-writing is killing pop music … if you listen to lyrics on any radio station, you don’t find anyone talking about anything deep or provocative”, she has since featured on two of Clean Bandit’s songs. Baby was released last November and peaked at No 15. Disappointingly, it was a generic tale of the one who got away.

So does Handmade Heaven suggest an album where she can finally blend popularity with meaning? The song evokes the very frustration she has felt throughout her career: “I carry along a feel of unease / I want to belong like the birds in the trees”, she sings, before finding solace in the handmade heaven of the title: a place she can write her own version of paradise.

Whether other people will ever want to enter it is still open to debate, but her sharply insightful worldview is rare in pop and deserves to be heard. Having disposed of all the personae to leave simply Marina, now is the perfect time for her to show her true potential with her next album in April. As Peter Robinson says, “if she doesn’t succeed with this, that’s a problem with pop culture – not a problem with Marina.”