The Voice alum turned alt-pop auteur returns after three years of silence to dismantle the very character that made her famous.
Cry Baby is dead, according to the press statement. What rises in her place is something harder to name.
Dropping without warning as the opening move of her first double album HADES, “POSSESSION” feels less like a comeback and more like a controlled detonation.
“POSSESSION” announces Melanie Martinez’s new era with the kind of violence pop doesn’t usually permit itself.
There’s no gentle transition here, no careful rebranding. She wakes up in a jar on someone’s shelf, porcelain and breakable, feeding kisses to avoid shattering.
The metaphor lands exactly where it should: in the space between recognising abuse and being powerless to leave it.
Martinez built her career on nursery-rhyme horror and pastel aesthetics, but “POSSESSION” strips away the whimsy.
What remains is the underlying brutality she was always circling. When she sings “I try my best to bite my tongue, but it keeps bleedin’,” the dual meaning cuts through the production.
She’s both silencing herself and suffering for it, the literal and figurative merging into a single wound that won’t close.
The production feels deliberately suffocating. Where Portals leaned into maximalist weirdness, CJ Baran’s work here is tighter, more controlled, the instrumentation wrapping around Martinez’s vocals like a fist.
Her voice moves between soft and strained, never quite screaming but always on the edge of it.
The drama doesn’t come from volume but from restraint, from what she’s holding back.
There’s a specific kind of trap Martinez describes here that pop rarely names outright.
Not just staying in something toxic, but performing compliance so thoroughly that you forget where the performance ends.
“Put me up like a prize, I’ll be a good housewife / You won’t see me cry when women come by” is sung with disturbing cheerfulness, the melody almost bouncing as the lyric caves in on itself.
She’s not drowning, she’s dusting off the shelf.
The outro offers escape but not freedom. A car crash, a concussion, damage reversed but bruising still visible.
Martinez doesn’t promise healing or closure. She promises survival that leaves marks.
The final line lingers: “Maybe bruised, but it’s not that bad.”
It’s the kind of thing you tell yourself when you don’t know what else to say, when leaving was supposed to fix everything but mostly just changed the scenery.
Martinez has always trafficked in discomfort disguised as camp, but “POSSESSION” feels different.
There’s less distance between the artist and the subject, fewer layers of theatrical remove. Cry Baby could be read as commentary. This just reads as lived.
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