In hindsight, however, is that such a bad thing? If Electra Heart had blown up to Gaga-esque proportions, would we have had Froot - considered by a number of fans to be her magnum opus? And nonetheless, Marina has always done her own thing, however, prioritisng her individuality: if she wanted to make a pop record, it was going to be her pop record. For the album, she worked with huge industry names like Diplo, Stargate and Benny Blanco, but while it went to number one in her native UK and hit 31 in the US, it wasn’t the runaway smash hit her label were striving for. It would be a stretch to suggest that Electra Heart was make or break for Marina, but it was definitely an attempt to make a real pop album with crossover appeal. Marina was only 26 at the time, but it’s a sad fact of the industry that it’s better to make it big young, something we’ve seen in recent years as the likes of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo have hit superstardom while still in their teens. It came two years after The Family Jewels. Even the Love + Fear double album, often considered by fans to be her weakest project, is a favourite of many, while The Family Jewels, Electra Heart, Froot and latest release Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land all have their fans.īut it is often Electra Heart that sticks out.
It’s a testament to her consistently strong body of work that whenever fans debate their favourite albums (like on this Reddit thread ) each one pops up with regularity. Marina and the Diamonds reveal video for 'I'm A Ruin'Īnd more broadly, how many pop stars from the UK have really broken through internationally? In terms of groups, there’s One Direction and Little Mix, and the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran have been flying the flag for solo artists, but when it comes to pure pop, who have we got that’s been able to rival the Katy Perrys and Lady Gagas of the world? Dua Lipa, and perhaps Charli XCX should be in that conversation, but nobody else has had that real global success in recent decades.
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Electra Heart, then, was the project designed to crack America, and while it didn’t make Marina a global star in the same vein as Katy Perry or Lady Gaga, say, she has a dedicated international fanbase to this day, and straddles the pop and indie markets well, as the success of the current Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land tour shows. However, Marina described her career as “more like a failure than a success” in January 2011, particularly when considering her popularity in the US, where The Family Jewels peaked at 138 in the charts. The Family Jewels was well-received a UK top-five album and second place on the BBC Sound of 2010 list is a pretty good start to your career by anyone’s standards. Her fierce lyricism and unapologetic persona was really exciting to me”, says Mia, 24. I was really into ‘cool’ female pop musicians like Lily Allen and Santigold – when Marina came along, she fit that category perfectly. At the time, that sort of quirky indie-pop was big in the charts, with plenty of overlap between fanbases: “I’m super proud to say I was a fan since the really early days in 2010. She released The Family Jewels at the age of 24, and its new-wave infused synthpop was a hit. A departure from the new-wave inspired sounds of Marina’s 2010 debut The Family Jewels, Electra Heart is pure electro-pop, and as Marina fan Ollie, 25, puts it, it’s “fundamentally one of the best pop records of our generation.”įrom the outset, there was something unique about Marina. You’d be hard-pressed to find an artist with such a consistently strong output, and the impact of Electra Heart - her real ‘pop’ album - cannot be overstated. Among seminal releases from Frank Ocean, Taylor Swift and Tame Impala (not to mention the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Olympics in London and Barack Obama’s re-election), there came Electra Heart.Īs difficult as it might be to believe, Marina’s second album celebrates its tenth birthday on Wednesday (27 April 2022).