At first glance, Leaches might feel like one of Melanie Martinez’s more quietly haunting songs from PORTALS.
But sit with it long enough and it becomes clear: this isn’t just a metaphor for toxic people.
It’s a full-body exorcism of every parasite that’s fed on her vulnerability — dressed up in her trademark pastel-horror aesthetic, but emotionally sharper than anything she’s released since Cry Baby.
What is the meaning behind Leaches by Melanie Martinez?
It’s about the kind of people who smile while they drain you. The ones who act like they’re helping but leave you emptier every time they leave the room.
Martinez doesn’t just point a finger — she paints an entire world where the act of being used becomes a gruesome fairytale, starting from childhood innocence to the moment you realise you’ve been hollowed out.
The track was first released as part of the PORTALS deluxe album on March 31, 2023, where it appears as the seventh song.
Melanie later directed the official music video herself, which premiered on March 28, 2025.
Within just 16 hours of its release, the video racked up over 831,000 views — proof that the song still resonates long after the album’s debut.
In her own words via Apple Music, Martinez explained:
“The next few songs are about conflict on earth. Living in the most vapid and isolating city of Los Angeles, I decided to write ‘LEECHES’ about people who live here for the wrong reasons, and how they act around people in the spotlight.”
The Sound: A Slow Decay in Soft Focus
Leaches leans into Martinez’s signature blend of eerie beauty — lullaby sweetness laced with discomfort.
Built on a plucked guitar loop and layered strings, the production (helmed by CJ Baran and Simon Says) echoes the emotional exhaustion it’s describing.
Nothing in the instrumental overpowers; instead, it lingers like something just under your skin — quiet, sticky, and strangely melodic.
The harmonies bend gently, like sighs rather than screams. That restraint is intentional.
Melanie doesn’t need sonic chaos to communicate distress. The unease is already built into every sustained note and soft, exhausted line delivery.
When she sings, “How much blood can you draw with your claws / from a flesh that’s not yours?”, the phrasing is almost whispered — a warning, not a cry for help.
Production Insight: The Sound of Quiet Desperation
The mood in Leaches isn’t just carried by the lyrics — it’s etched into every slowed strum and hushed vocal layer.
Melanie Martinez doesn’t go for the usual heartbreak ballad formula. Instead, the track unfolds like a soft implosion, using restraint as its main instrument.
The song opens with gentle, repetitive plucking that feels both intimate and claustrophobic.
It’s the kind of loop that could easily lull you into a false sense of calm — until the dissonance creeps in.
That creeping tension mirrors the emotional theme: the realisation that the people around you aren’t companions, they’re consumers.
There’s a deliberate choice to keep things sparse. You don’t get big percussion or sweeping strings at first — just space.
And in that space, every line Melanie sings lands heavier. You feel how drained she is. The softness becomes a kind of numbness. It sounds like someone who’s too exhausted to scream.
Even when the sound swells in the chorus, it never explodes. It presses in.
There’s something unsettling about how smooth the transitions are — as if the emotional erosion she’s describing has become routine.
A few well-placed chords shift beneath her vocals like quicksand, pulling you down with her.
What’s clever here is that the chords themselves repeat, but they don’t resolve.
Instead, they circle. They trap. Much like the dynamic she’s singing about — people who take and take and leave you right where they found you.
It’s in the small shifts — an extra vocal layer, a sudden dip, the momentary silence between lines — that the real damage is done. The song doesn’t beg for attention. It quietly bleeds out.
Melanie Martinez Leaches Lyrics Meaning — Line by Line
“Slimy and superficial / Straining their artificial”
Martinez sets the tone early: she’s not writing about cartoon villains. These people are the kind that smile too wide and compliment too often. The ones who overcompensate just enough for you to doubt your gut.
“Yapping to seem official / Making it beneficial to their cause”
The performative nature of manipulation — talk fast, act like you care, then take what you came for. Martinez captures the transactional subtlety of these relationships, where nothing is given without an angle.
“Caught in the river of the tears that I cried”
She’s drowning, but not from fresh pain — it’s the buildup of everything that’s come before. There’s an exhaustion here that’s deeply familiar to anyone who’s had to keep forgiving the same person in different disguises.
“They lift all the covers, pull me into their sight”
There’s no safety. Even retreat isn’t allowed. Hiding under the covers — the childhood instinct for protection — is breached. It’s a line that evokes violation without needing to shout it.
“How much blood can you draw with your claws / From a flesh that’s not yours?”
This might be the clearest thesis of the entire song. You can only give so much before there’s nothing left. And even then, they ask for more.
“Let all their friends in, the enemy’s present”
The betrayal isn’t just personal — it spreads. These aren’t isolated incidents; they’re patterns. You don’t just get hurt by one person. You get hurt by the ecosystem they drag in with them.
“They eat off the table that you set, so you starve”
Maybe the most devastating line in the song. There’s no clearer metaphor for being used. And worse — being left with nothing.
The Leaches Music Video: A Picture Book of Psychological Damage
If the song sounds like quiet desperation, the music video drags that mood into full visual horror.
Directed by Martinez herself, the video uses a child protagonist — small, pink-clad, wide-eyed — to make the pain more stark. The leech she meets isn’t immediately menacing. It wears a bowtie. It’s “cute.” And that’s the point.
We watch this child love the leech, feed it, care for it. Even as it grows bigger, even as she grows paler.
The most horrifying moment isn’t when it attacks her — it’s when she smiles at it mid-collapse, still trying to love it into being kind. It mirrors the real world too closely.
People don’t always realise they’re being used until they’ve already given too much.
As one commenter noted, “She starts the video already crying — before the leech even shows up. That’s what makes it worse. She was already in the trenches.”
Leaches Meaning by Melanie Martinez: Beyond the Surface
This track doesn’t just speak to toxicity. It interrogates how we’re taught to accept it.
The protagonist of the video is a child because, as Martinez shows us, the training starts early. We’re told to be nice. We’re told not to say no. And by the time we realise we’ve been drained, the damage is already done.
Still, there’s no clean moral arc here. No empowering final chorus. Just the bleak, almost mundane truth that sometimes, all you can do is recognise the leeches — and stop feeding them.
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