Melanie Martinez has made her return to music with new ‘PORTALS’ album

Melanie Martinez has released the highly anticipated follow-up album to 2019′s ‘K-12′, returning with a new persona to drive her vision in the new album ‘PORTALS’. The singer has been seen donning pink skin, and prosthetics to become the ethereal alien-like creature born out of her previous persona named “Cry Baby.”

With visuals that feature magical forests, giant mushroom trees, giant eggs, and an overall theme of death and rebirth, ‘PORTALS’ is Martinez’s message of hope for learning how to move on past grief.

An album that focuses on the cycle of death and rebirth

In a track-by-track guide that Martinez made exclusively for Apple Music, the artist gives a better idea of what she hoped to achieve with this theatrical new album.

“I wanted to challenge my listeners’ perspective by essentially saying: Just like us after Cry Baby’s vessel on earth has died, she lives on as a spirit in the cosmos,” she explained.

“It was important for me to show the immortality of being a human with this record—to give people hope that there’s life after death.”

The album’s opening track, and also its debut single ‘DEATH’, opens with the words: “Death is life is death is life is death is life is.”

The song revolves around the idea that Martinez’s new persona lives on, although her body has died. She gives hope to listeners that she hears them, after her absence from music, and gives them signs that she’s still alive, just in a different form.

Influences and creative process

Recording the album was a process for Martinez that involved long hours in what she dubbed her “portal room”, and even influence from the spiritual realm, as she explains for ‘DEATH’:

“I heard a spirit with a completely different tone than mine repeat a melody I had sung out loud in the silence and it send a chill down my body,” she said of the inspiration driving the song.

“I was really scared at first, then continued on, using that moment as confirmation from the other side. I laid down the chords; I added a simple drum look in the chorus. That was later replaced by production from my favorite collaborator CJ Baran, as well as live drums from Illan Rubin of Nine Inch Nails who also put drums down for a couple of other songs.”

Other songs focus on more taboo subjects and speak about political topics, which Martinez strives to do on each of her albums.

“On each of my albums, I like to include at least one ‘taboo’ song about something many people deal with, but no one talks about in music. I wanted to write a fun, lighthearted song about being a person who experiences menstruation, how blood represents vitality and life,” Martinez said of the song ‘MOON CYCLE’.

“I wanted the chorus to be pretty and to use analogies for bleeding that were sweet. The rumbling sounds that lead into the song are my actual period cramps, recorded on my phone.”

‘PORTALS’ can be streamed on all major music streaming platforms.