Marina Diamandis has dropped the diamonds and has re-appeared in her rightful place in the music industry, after deciding to quit music for good at the end of her Neon Nation Tour three years ago. Her recent comeback as ‘MARINA’ leaves her previous pop persona in the past. Her new album ‘Love + Fear’ represents her journey as an artist, and has already proved a success with fans.
Marina first appeared in the music scene in 2009, with the stage name ‘Marina and The Diamonds’, where she performed at Glastonbury and Radio 1’s big weekend, but it wasn’t until her hit single ‘Primadonna’ that her popularity began to grow. The persona she created for herself was a bubbly cartoonised representation of a strong female identity, which was the basis of her first two albums ‘Electra Heart’ and ‘Froot’.
The Neon Nation Tour began in October 2015; this was a huge tour for Marina, who travelled across Europe and America performing tracks from all three of her albums. Whilst on tour, Marina grieved the loss of both her Aunt and Grandmother all within a short amount of time. Unable to cancel dates, Diamandis had to face performing on stage every night whilst trying to cope with her loss.
This pressure led to significant depression and anxiety, and after the tour wrapped up in 2016, Marina announced her departure from music. Three years later, she explains “I didn’t feel the same about music anymore or why I was motivated to be an artist”. After an obviously gruelling tour, she said that she stopped growing as an artist “I don’t want my face on anything. I don’t like anyone looking at me”.
During her three year break, Diamandis decided she needed time to find herself as an individual, away from her musical identity. She tried her hand at floristry and acting, but eventually went back to school to study Psychology at Birbeck University of London. During the extensive amount of time spent studying, Marina’s creative impulses began to come back.
Marina has always been an introspective artist, giving hints on her album ‘FROOT’ that she wasn’t happy living within the music industry; but her comeback albums are more introspective than ever. She released two full albums in April this year titled ‘LOVE’ and ‘LOVE+FEAR’, which stemmed from her time studying Psychology, where she learnt that everything we do stems from the feeling of either love or fear. “I thought it was a beautiful, universal way of painting a picture of human experience”.
“There are only two emotions: Love and Fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. We cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites”
– Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
— MARINA (@MarinaDiamandis) April 4, 2019
The shift in name also comes with a shift of image, having stripped back both her personality and her vocals for her 2019 releases. Marina has left her colourful cover images in the past, and has switched up to a more mature black and white album cover, reflective of this new stage in her life. One of the first tracks released from the album was ‘Handmade Heaven’ which is almost a diary entry, perfect for her cult following to understand what exactly it was that Diamandis was going through.
MARINA 2019 Tour Tickets are currently available from her website, you can see the UK tour dates below:
29/04 – O2 Academy – Newcastle
30/04 – O2 Academy – Glasgow
03/05 – Royal Albert Hall – London
07/05 – O2 Academy – Bournemouth
09/05 – O2 Academy – Birmingham
10/05 – O2 Apollo – Manchester
18-21/07 – Latitude Festival – Suffolk
