'Electra Heart,' MARINA's cult classic album, turns 10
Yesterday, April 27, marked a decade since Marina Diamandis-then recording as Marina & the Diamonds-released her sophomore album Electra Heart.
"Created with all the bells and whistles of pure pop," writes Hannah Ziegler, "[Electra Heart] employed an intricate, eponymous persona who dazzled many a Tumblr feed" and divided critics at the time of its release. It debuted atop the UK Albums Chart with 21,358 copies sold, and peaked at Number 31 on the US Billboard 200 after selling approximately 11,000 copies.
To mark the album's 10th anniversary, NYLON spoke to several players involved in its creation, including Diamandis herself, about its "complicated legacy."
• On the Electra Heart sessions: "I was working in LA, starting to co-write with people, particularly pop people, for the first time. I remember I was staying pretty close to Hollywood Boulevard, near these really tacky vintage shops, and I started to buy these '60s and '70s, very feminine articles of clothing. So it's actually tied to fashion-that's how it began.
"Rick [Nowels] had a book in his library called Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop and again, that led to the hyper-feminine imagery that I was being attracted to at the time, so that's how ['Bubblegum Bitch'] came about. Even the lyrics like, 'Queentex, latex, I'm your wonder maid'-Queentex, latex, and Wonder Maid were manufacturers of the shift dresses that I kept buying in the vintage stores." -Marina Diamandis, Artist
• On the album's visuals: "Marina referenced this movie by Wim Wenders called Paris, Texas where the protagonist had this wig on and was in a process of changing her personality, visually. So that was kind of the starting point for the ["Radioactive"] video... We did all the photography for the record sleeve and all the press photos in LA a couple of months later.
Click to view"We did one really big photo shoot [for Tumblr], like four days where we basically just played around with all these stylings and hair and makeup; all these American archetype characters that she wanted to portray on the album." -Casper Balslev, Photographer
"I literally created [the album] via Tumblr, that's no exaggeration... At that time, it was kind of coming towards its peak as this subversive platform that underground kids or non-mainstream kids would go on. I utilized that hugely, because I thought it was so interesting that I had access to essentially what other people are thinking about. I was also obsessed with how the zeitgeist has informed pop culture for so many years, so it really was an Internet album, to the highest degree." -Diamandis
• On polarizing listeners: "My hope was that people would enjoy this fantasy or this character that I created, and that they would enjoy delving deeper into it, because it's so multilayered. I don't think that really matched the reality for what the press thought. I know on a fan level, a lot of fans were intrigued by it, and whether they liked it or not, they were interested. But with press, I think because the people who were reviewing the album and talking about it were a generation above me, they just didn't get it." -Diamandis
"She gave us ballads, she gave us bangers, she gave us a cohesive story through the perspectives of different archetypes... it's a heartbreak album, so I think that's universal. I don't think the critics were scouring her Tumblr to understand the archetypes and what she was trying to portray. I think they just said, 'Oh, this is her sound from The Family Jewels. This is her sound for Electra Heart. She's selling out.'" -Lia H*., Blogger (fuckyeahelectraheart)
• On Electra's second life: "It's crazy that ['Bubblegum Bitch'] became a hit for Marina 10 years later! It now has more streams on Spotify than my song [with Belinda Carlisle] 'Heaven is a Place on Earth.' That's a big deal." -Rick Nowels, Producer
"I think of the album very joyfully and it's really my fan base, old and new, that have changed that for me. It honestly took me a while to feel emotionally OK about it. The harshness of the press response had really shaken me; it took honestly, maybe two or three years to reverse out of that." -Diamandis
In honor of #ElectraHeart’s 10th anniversary, we looked back at the beloved album’s complicated legacy.https://t.co/09jGnevhl6
- NYLON (@NylonMag) April 24, 2022
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