FEATURE:
Revisiting…
MARINA - Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land
__________
THE wonderful and underrated…
fifth studio album from the Welsh singer-songwriter MARINA (Marina Lambrini Diamandis), Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land was released on 11th June, 2021 by Atlantic Records. MARINA began writing music for the record in August 2019, a mere five months after the release of her fourth studio album, Love + Fear. Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land was produced by (Marina) Diamandis, Jennifer Decilveo and James Flannigan, and the album tackled themes such as feminism, global warming, misogyny, heartbreak, and racism. It reached the top twenty in the U.K. In spite of that, I feel it is an album that passed many by. Recorded in Los Angeles and London, I think that Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is a fantastic album that is among the best of last year. I am going to get to a couple of the positive reviews for MARINA’s fifth studio album. Following 2019’s conceptual LOVE + FEAR, Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land had a slightly different feel and set of themes at the forefront. Billboard asked MARINA about the creative process and some of the standout songs:
“When did you start writing these songs?
In August 2019. I wrote “Man’s World” first, and then I think just like a month before the pandemic, I wrote “Pandora’s Box.” And then everything after that was in the middle of the pandemic.
How did that affect your creative process?
I mean, when I look back on “Purge the Poison,” it’s such a frenetic song — and it makes sense, because we were all just trying to catch up with these really extreme life events and social events. A lot of social problems have been unveiled for exactly what they are in the pandemic, and that’s definitely mirrored in some of the songs. “New America” was written after the murder of George Floyd. I started it, I think, around that time, and then didn’t really touch it again for six months.
I just felt like it’s such a sensitive topic — particularly being a non-American, but still commenting on racism, which is a problem everywhere still. I wanted to be sure that I was coming from a place that was hopefully not taken as preachy, but we were just as exploratory. So yeah, in short, it has affected my writing a lot. It’s really hard not to — I’m an artist who’s always gained a lot of inspiration from culture and pop culture since the start.
When you have such a visceral reaction to everything that was going on in the news last year, is it hard to organize your thoughts around topics as loaded as what you touch upon in “New America”? Just in terms of sitting down, thinking about verses and choruses and being able to be succinct with those ideas.
Yeah, it is. And, you know, sometimes I’m not succinct, but maybe that’s not the point. Like with “Purge the Poison,” I was trying to give snapshots from the past 20 years of pop culture, and how we’ve treated certain people and also how we’ve treated our environment, our planet. All of these problems are now becoming really distressing. So organizing my thoughts on that was much weirder than some of the other songs. [Laughs.] But with “New America,” I’ll be interested to see how people respond to that, because I think whenever you put out a semi-political or political opinion in a song, you are like putting yourself out there to be criticized.
Even with “Purge the Poison,” they’re saying lines back at you and being like, “Well, you’re privileged, why are you writing this?” And the thing is — someone has to write about it, you know? Particularly with racism, white people have to talk about this as well, and I’m never coming from a place of like, pointing fingers. We’re all involved in this. Songwriting has always been a vehicle for me to explore things that challenge me, and things that upset me. So it’s definitely tricky to organize thoughts on really important subjects, and at the end of the day, whatever people think, that’s just how I’ve been able to deal with that at the time. So you can only hope that it’s received in the way that it was intended.
This obviously isn’t your first album that has approached issues from a sociological perspective. But listening to it, it does feel like you’re holding back less than ever. Does that just come with time and experience?
Yeah, I do feel very free on this record. And one of the good things about me is that, when I write, I don’t worry about anything that other people are going to say. That happens later in the process. [Laughs.] But when I’m actually making a song, I never feel any censorship.
I guess it depends what kind of album you’re making, too. Love + Fear did touch on a few of those topics, on songs like “To Be Human,” but it was generally a different type of album. And I felt different as an individual at that time in my life, whereas this time, I just felt like I didn’t have anything to lose artistically.
You touch upon the world at large, climate change and the crisis we’re all living in. Is that something that you’ve been thinking about, and wanting to write about, for a long time? Was there something that recently triggered wanting to hone in on that in your songwriting?
I mean, I think there’s a lot to be said for what’s happening collectively, and I’m just like everyone else where climate change is at the back of my mind, all the time. I’m sure you feel the same. It’s like this gnawing thing that has steadily gotten stronger over the years. And I think with COVID, with the pandemic and being able to step back and see what kind of situation we’re living in socially and politically, it just feels like there’s nowhere for those issues to hide anymore. And that’s why they’ve come out in the songwriting. So it’s not I haven’t thought about it before, to put it in songs. But I think everything just reaches a tipping point, sometimes.
On “Purge the Poison,” you sing about the idea of a sisterhood reshaping society that has failed, in part due to misogyny. There’s a line about Britney Spears: “Britney shaved her head, and all we did was call her crazed.” Was that inspired by the recent documentary?
No. Weirdly, that was written last April, and completed then. I think it’s really interesting how we are able to look back on that. And I just think it’s a really brave thing for journalists who reported on her at the time to be able to look back and say, “You know what? We didn’t treat her in the right way.” And that was linked to a wider problem: At the time, we didn’t understand mental health in the same way. We saw someone who was evidently having a nervous breakdown, and who had led a really high-stress life, and basically made fun of her for it. I mean, that’s not what “Purge” is about, but it was worth mentioning her in this commentary about femininity.
As a pop artist, have you felt the discourse around your own art — and around pop itself, around women in the music industry — evolve over the course of your career? Are things better now since when you debuted, or still too much the same?
That’s such a great question. I think it’s definitely changed for the better. Female artists are given a lot more space to experiment and to become more commercial if they choose to be. At the time, it was very difficult to switch over to pop if if you had alternative roots. It was like, I always felt like my authenticity was questioned if I wasn’t doing these albums where I’m totally writing on my own, or using live instruments. But also, women were judged by how they looked a lot more, and shamed for that.
But now, the main difference that I’ve seen just online as an artist — I feel like the media are potentially kinder to artists, but the fan-artist relationship has changed, I think. In a positive way, fans have become a lot more analytical and use critical thinking more, but they’re also hyper-critical — to the point where I think it has the capacity to dent that artist-fan relationship, because it’s just so hard to read negativity about yourself, every day”.
The second interview is from Vogue. It is interesting reading the interviews MARINA gave around the release of Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land. I think Purge the Poison is the one that track that seems to stand out above all of the rest in terms of the impact and lyrical weight:
“Vogue: The first song you wrote for the album was “Man’s World,” in which you sing, “I don’t wanna live in a man’s world anymore.” Would you say the album is deliberately feminine?
Marina: Femininity has been such a negative trait for so long. It’s shameful to be feminine, whether you’re a man or woman. That’s dating back hundreds of years, and I think it’s really to the detriment of society because we’ve all had to try and be more masculine in order to succeed or to be accepted. We all have masculine and feminine traits. Masculinity is being goal driven, disciplined, forceful; femininity is what your relationship with nature is, being nurturing and intuitive. There’s a huge connection [between] what’s happening with our planet right now and the lack of femininity in the world. On a personal level, I really wanted to embody more of that [femininity] and to work on that in myself. That’s really the main theme of the whole record.
Do you feel the music industry is still very much a man’s world?
I’ve experienced it in that there aren’t many women employed in the labels. My record label is one of the few that has a woman at the top, both in the U.K. and the U.S., but that’s still quite rare. With studios and production, it’s predominantly male still. Sometimes it’s boring to discuss, but we do need to keep talking about it until that changes. Five years ago, we still weren’t really having these discussions.
Let’s talk about “Purge the Poison,” one of my favorite tracks. You reference Britney Spears in it, and there’s been a lot of talk around the music industry’s treatment of her. Did you connect with her in that kind of way?
I think about her a lot because I’m such a big fan. The way we have treated women growing up and the way that you and I grew up with the tabloids—that all contributes to how I’ve felt as a woman growing up in this music industry. I’m happy to see how things are changing. Britney, unfortunately, has become this symbol for a very specific treatment of women. I really hope that things are going to change for her; she’s got such a magic quality. We didn’t have the same understanding of mental health that we do now. It’s very clear that she was having a nervous breakdown, and the only response people should have had is compassion. But it was pretty much the opposite—just being completely disrespectful and making fun of her. And in a way, that’s still continued online, even with my own fan-base experience. [It’s still popular] to make fun of artists.
On “New America,” you really go in hard on America’s dark history, with references to both stolen land and systemic racism. Was there a specific event that got you thinking about doing that song?
George Floyd’s murder, definitely. I wrote some of the song the day after that happened, and then I realized that I shouldn’t be writing this right now. I needed to understand, on a much deeper level, what was happening. [American history] is mine, but it’s not mine: I’m not American, and I haven’t lived my whole life here. The U.K. certainly doesn’t have a clean track record, nor does Greece, and these are the places where I’ve grown up. But America has been this empire—it’s like the world’s superpower—and we all have looked to America for how to progress and evolve. I feel like there’s been a feeling of relief after the past year, that we can at least be truthful about what the United States is and what the social problems are here—as opposed to just continuing as if they don’t exist.
Your work span genres, but do you think the pop genre is changing in that artists can now explore these darker themes?
We have a really healthy landscape now compared to 10 years ago. Now, anything goes! It’s so much more freeing and healthy. Teenagers and people in their 20s need to hear songs about what they’re actually going through. We don’t need 90% of songs to be about partying in the club—though we do need those songs too. We need a balance.
Another song that really struck me was “Venus Fly Trap.” You sing, “Why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus flytrap.” You don’t strike me as a wallflower.
I think I’m in between! I have periods of being a wallflower. It doesn’t really relate so much to being flamboyant or extroverted; it’s more about how you feel internally about yourself. It’s a celebratory song. I’ve carried a lot of shame in my life that didn’t belong to me, and I’ve only recently really been able to liberate myself from that. As a result, I’ve been able to look at my career and feel proud of the fact that I haven’t had to compromise that much. All artists have to compromise a little, but it’s amazing that I’ve had the creative freedom to write the records that I want. You don’t have to conform in order to see success in your creative life.
Speaking of creativity, I’ve been digging the fashion you’ve been wearing in your new music videos. What’s been inspiring you in the realm of style lately?
I’ve been doing very feminine, structured stuff. I’ve been working with a designer called Olima. He made this vampy, widow’s-peak corset for the album cover—we did them in metallic pink and baby blue. He also did the outfits for “Man’s World” and “Venus.”
You also write a lot about love and heartbreak on this record, like in “I Love You But I Love Me More.” Did this stem from personal experience?
All of those songs stemmed from a breakup. I was in a relationship for five and a half years. It was my longest relationship to date; I loved and still love the person dearly. I use songwriting as a way to work out how I feel about something because my brain covers up loads of stuff, and it takes me a while to sift through the layers of detritus to figure out what decision to make and how I actually felt about this. When you’re in a relationship, there’s a very normal tendency to cover your own feelings up in order to maintain the health of the relationship, but that doesn’t work for anyone in the end. The truth is, the thing that holds people together is authenticity”.
I am going to conclude with some reviews. There were some who were mixed. Others said that Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land did not match the best of MARINA (formerly Marina and the Diamonds). Froot, the last album under Marina and the Diamonds, is an album that many consider to the gold standard. This is what CLASH said about MARINA’s most recent album:
“In every interview that Marina Diamandis gave in 2019 – her most recent to date, except for one that she gave to Vogue in late 2020 and the one that she managed to sneak in the New York Times last week – she talks about feeling like she was ready to quit the music industry. Cue the devastation, the burning buildings, the twitter outrage.
As it turns out, Marina didn’t altogether quit the music industry: she dropped the Diamonds moniker and spent the past year reclaiming her sense of self. A wise choice, given her natural instinct for songwriting and her lion-like resilience (we’ve heard a great story that involved a Virgin Records ad, a search for the next One Direction, and a girl dressed in drag). For her first act of self-reclamation, Marina released ‘Love + Fear’ in 2019, a dual-part record inspired by the elemental philosophy of psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.
Now, Marina returns with her fifth studio album, ‘Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land’, a 10-track wonder that is a more mature and eclectic take on her gloriously femme and thundering electro-pop. The record opens with the carnivalesque and neo-classical: title-track ‘Ancient Dreams…’ is infused with dry, desert landscapes and sounds that are earthy and elemental. Marina attributes these colour compositions, her choice of rich magentas and blossoming greens to classical portrait artist John William Godard, a strong inspiration on the visual element of this project.
‘Venus Fly Trap’, ‘Man’s World’ and ‘I Love You But I Love Me More’ lyrically revive the Marina from the days of Electra Heart (“I’ve got the beauty, got the brains, got the power, hold the reins. I should be motherfucking crazy.”), a project that in its prime, was wildly defiant and wonderfully juvenile. At its peak is sensory ephemera ‘Purge the Poison’, with remix featuring Pussy Riot, and a heady, visual world of chains, leather and female power.
We are brought back down to earth with ‘Flowers’ and ‘Goodbye’ two ballads dominated by piano and Marina’s spiraling vocal twangs. These tracks certainly change the momentum of the record, but in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural or forced. Marina makes a strong case for embracing a change of trajectory: in life, music and art. There is something to be said for the Art Of Quitting. Or at least detaching ourselves from the things in life that no longer bring us joy.
8/10”.
I am finishing with the review from The Line of Best Fit. They noted improvement and sharpening in terms of the sound, ambitions, and impact. Songs like Man’s World and Purge the Poison are among the best of MARINA’s career. Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land is sorely undervalued in my view:
“Harking back to 2010’s The Family Jewels, MARINA’s self-penned Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land does away with the lowest common denominator electro inflections that marred her last full-length body of work.
The result reads more like a follow-up to the personal Froot (2015) than it does the collaborative Love + Fear, and finds MARINA emboldening her trademark theatrical glam with sharper edges.
A whirlwind of an opening, and also setting the tone for the albums first half, the title track is a re-actualization of Muse’s "Uprising" - sharing thunderous percussion and a sense of urgency with the former. MARINA’s voice soars across a rambunctious bass line, her angelic soprano launching into orbit as she senses the advent of a revolution. A sense of hard-earned confidence rises to the surface: the ebullience of the first track and the fruits of its introspection are echoed in the second, a sassy self-empowerment call to arms that only grows more hectic with time. “Why be a wallflower when you can be a Venus flytrap?”, MARINA ponders in jest.
Her vocal dynamism translates particularly well in rock-leaning settings, where her leaping registers make their way through enthralling kicks and mean guitar riffs. She flies across second single “Purge The Poison”, confronting turbulence with ease and getting her every word in despite the constant menace of being overthrown by an instrumental neurosis.
It’s precisely those moments of maximalism across Ancient Dreams that glue the collection of tracks together. The relentless "New America" is the hymn of a country ready to confront its demons: anthemic and critical at the same time, it pushes the idea that the social reckonings of last year should amount to more accountability and action at a systemic level. MARINA spells the end of an era of willful naivete: “America, you can’t bury the truth / It’s time to pay your dues”.
Despite a relatively short runtime two distinct albums seem to be vying for the listener’s attention: a socio-politically charged alternative pop rock epic on one side and a more tender intimate narrative following heartbreak on the other. It's the ballads of Ancient Dreams that bear the brunt of this slight schizophrenia. "Highly Emotional People" might be rooted in a specific past relationship with Clean Bandit’s Jack Patterson but it’s hard not to hear it as a broader statement about masculinity, even more so considering the track’s placement–wedged in between the intense "Purge The Poison" and "New America". There’s a disheartening simplicity in lyrics like “people say men don’t cry” that only scratch the surface of a topic that’s become a touchstone of popular culture.
But, some good comes from personal musings getting turned into grander ideas - whether intentional or not. Pandora becomes a feminist icon, reclaiming control over her own fate in "Pandora’s Box". The ancestral representative of the world’s woes transcends the misogyny of the original myth into a symbol of power and independence in MARINA’s hands. The track proves that somewhere amongst the ruins of Ancient Dreams lies a path to merging the album’s twin souls into one”.
A brilliant album that is one of the most underrated of 2021, I wanted to put MARINA’s Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land back into the spotlight. I know a sixth album is being worked on at the moment. That will be interesting to hear what comes about! 22nd May, Marina Diamandis announced Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land would be her last album with Atlantic Records. She had been signed to the record label for the past fourteen years. It seems a new era is ahead. Whether you are a fan of MARINA or new to the music, then go and check this amazing album out. She is an independent artist now, and her next chapter is going to be interesting. Marina Diamandis is truly…
A wonderful artist.