Things looked a little different the last time Marina Diamandis toured Australia. Julia Gillard was the prime minister, LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem was the biggest song in the country, you could still find a Sizzler in the odd suburb, and Kings Cross’ World Bar was still slinging those questionable teapot cocktails. Plenty of things have changed (although perhaps Sizzler will make a comeback after all).
By the time Diamandis touches down in Australia this month for a run of east coast shows, it will have been more than 15 years since the Welsh-Greek pop star first appeared here in support of her 2010 debut album, The Family Jewels. Things have changed for Diamandis as well, starting with her own name: the original Marina and the Diamonds is no more, now it’s just Marina.
“I remember we were on a kind of semi-tour with a bunch of other bands who were just doing the same festival line-ups,” Diamandis recalls over the line from Los Angeles, where she’s been based for many years. “It was quite a hectic time for me because I’d done around 135 shows in a year. I remember coming home for Christmas for two nights and then leaving for Australia.”
With its brash, theatrical pop that tipped its hat to other alt-pop greats like Sparks and Regina Spektor, The Family Jewels endeared Diamandis to legions of Tumblr-dwelling fans. Her second album Electra Heart produced some of the biggest hits of her career: the sugary gut-punch of Bubblegum Bitch and the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek Primadonna among them. The album was a loosely conceptual record following a blonde-wig-wearing, cigarette-touting character named Electra Heart, who was meant to represent the crumbling myth of the American Dream. Over the top? Absolutely.
Reviews at the time didn’t exactly shower the record in glory but Electra Heart – which was produced by pop powerhouses including Greg Kurstin, the now-disgraced Dr Luke, and Stargate – became a cult favourite among pop fans, who endlessly dissected it in online forums. In recent years it has surged in popularity thanks to TikTok, so much so that two tracks from the album – Teen Idle and Bubblegum Bitch – were certified gold in 2022 and 2021 respectively, a decade after release.
“I’m so happy for that record,” says Diamandis. “I felt like it always deserved that … I feel really proud of the creativity behind the record; I was working so hard at that time. It was such an intense time in my life. It’s definitely one of – I don’t want to say the most creative record but it had such a rich visual world for people to examine or buy into. It’s a special record and I totally understand how it can still resonate for people, even if they’re in a different generation.”
Electra Heart was followed by the campy Europop of Froot, after which Diamandis took an extended break. She returned simply as Marina in 2019 with the stripped-back Love + Fear, before 2021’s Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, which was more classic Marina fare with its technicolour, spiralling choruses.
Her most recent album, 2025’s maximalist, dramatic Princess of Power, finds her firmly back in the Electra Heart/Family Jewels universe. Its biggest single, the delightfully named C—issimo, opens with shuddering violins before belting along at a thousand miles an hour, powered by the thickest synths an engineer could muster. It’s an energetic record in many ways, and appropriately so: Diamandis recently recovered from a long battle with chronic fatigue syndrome.
“I do feel really well again and I’m sure listeners can feel the difference between Love + Fear and this record,” Diamandis says after a pause. “I started recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome in 2023 and it’s only recently that I don’t have to scan my body each day to be like, do I have the buzzing today? Or am I dreading social events and going to have to push myself through them?”
Thematically, Princess of Power finds Diamandis playing in a familiar space: womanhood, sensuality, the politics of gender and ageing. It’s been a constant thread throughout all of Diamandis’ work and has been on her mind more, lately, as she recently turned 40.
“I think you can have a lot more fun as you get older. What I’ve been pleasantly surprised by is that once you get over the scary hump, you kind of let go and you’re like, ‘OK, I am ageing’,” she says, laughing. “I am quite literally ageing and there’s nothing that can stop this except for Botox. You actually transition into this space I think a lot of women in their 40s and 50s talk about, and they’re like, ‘Hello, come over here. It’s great over here!’
“It’s this wildly intoxicating moment where you’re like, f—, I’ve been living in this trap and I didn’t even know I wasn’t free because I just wanted to be liked, or I just wanted to have certain type of attention. And it’s also crazy to be like, oh yeah, your 20s is the best decade and then everything is downhill. My 20s were the most chaotic! I never want to go back. My heart goes out to anybody in their 20s.”
There are many kitschy, fun moments on Princess of Power but the most affecting comes on Adult Girl. Over floating piano chords Diamandis reflects on a strange life lived: “Robbed me of a teenage world/Now I’m just an adult girl/Someone, tell me how to heal the terror livin’ inside me/I don’t even know what’s real, I just know I wanna be free”.
It’s a natural successor to Teen Idle from Electra Heart, when Marina longed for a glittery teenage dream while being “super super super suicidal”. Fans quickly connected the two tracks but Diamandis admits it wasn’t a conscious decision to link the two songs. “No, it wasn’t the intention when I was writing it,” she says. “But afterwards I was like, this feels like a sequel. It answers some of the questions the listener might have from that first song.
“A lot shifted for me after writing Adult Girl. I was like, OK, part of me is f—ed up, and that is OK. Lots of us have these parts of our lives that we’ve hated, or experiences that have hung around and they don’t feel like us any more and they’re kind of preventing us from growing up. Particularly when we’re talking about sexuality or sensuality, let’s say, I’ve always felt this kind of little girliness in me, up until this record. I was like, what’s fully stopping me from stepping into this sense of womanhood? Which I think a lot of women can relate to. Adult Girl was the result of that. It’s saying goodbye to that portion of me, and it felt great.”
TikTok may have powered a recent rise in streams for Diamandis’ back catalogue but she’s circumspect about the impact of the platform as a whole – and she’s particularly critical of the music industry’s desire to pressure younger artists to churn out content.
“I think the worst thing is to become boring as an artist, and the algorithm almost teaches you to become that because they’re hoping for this one viral video,” she says. “And more importantly, if you don’t take any breaks for yourself, you’re not giving yourself the stillness required to deeply transform. Artists really need to go away because our true creativity is coming from within us. And when you are on TikTok all the time, or you’re producing content all the time … the culture that you’re seeing has already been created. There’s nothing new. So you’re just regurgitating more and more of the same.
“I’m super against producing low-meaning content,” she finishes. “Save it all for the stuff that matters and don’t worry about staying relevant.”
Marina performs at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on February 24, Brisbane’s QPAC Forecourt on February 26, and Melbourne’s Palace Foreshore on February 28.
