What Happened to Marina

I will not ignore this communal brain hemorrhage that the Diamonds are experiencing. I don’t know how else one can defend how corny, trite, and boring the new Marina song “Butterfly” is.

I know how hard it can be to accept the loss of your favorite artist growing stale— as a longtime Katy cat I even defended Smile when it first came out, but everyone has a breaking point. And Marina’s has come multiple times over at this point.

The turning point honestly came with Froot, which has some of her best songs and also showed the skills growing stale. I still remember getting irrationally angry when she dropped “Forget” as a single, with its one word chorus and the superbly forced abacus metaphor, but I told myself it was a one-time miss.

But then came Love + Fear, where the ratios switched and the flaws became the focus with a few sprinkles of bright spots. I’ll let the lesser tracks on Froot pass, but Love + Fear was her first strike, singing passe songs about how big the world is but we’re all still so alike!! Isn’t that crazy how birds of a feather fly together??

Then whatever that album about Modern Land or whatever was strike two, making pink pussy hat, #resist music a good five years too late. Even enlisting fucking Pussy Riot could not give her any credibility.  And before you ask, no I didn’t listen to the album. I heard 45 seconds of “Purge the Poison” and that was more than enough of a chance.

Now with the release of “Butterfly”, it’s just the painful reminder that that Marina we loved is gone and she isn’t coming back. The freaky slinky girl making cuckoo sounds on “Mowgli’s Road” or the bottle blond Electra Heart character with the heart shaped beauty mark that defined Tumblr is creatively spent. She’s busy singing how she’s a butterfly, already high, floating over all that stale hater energy 💞✨🦋💅.

I get legitimately embarrassed hearing those lyrics in 2025, I would almost excuse them if she put the song out 10 years ago. But now it seems that when Marina killed the Diamonds she killed all her talent and appeal with it.

Diamonds defending “Butterfly” are not real

friends. They are the friends that will say you look great to your face and turn around and talk shit the second you’re out of earshot. I don’t think that unflappable praise is the sign of love. It’s taking the easy way out to dig your heals in the sand rather than admitting defeat and corse correcting. I would feel much more love and support by someone telling me I have egg on my face to stop me from looking like a mess than someone letting me go out and look like a fool just to protect my fragile ego. And really, standing by such bad music is selfish in its own way, as the Diamonds seem to prioritize their own parasocial relationship with the fallen artist rather than care about whether the music is good or not.

I knew not to expect much when she announced the new project, but it felt like a new low when Marina was assuring fans in the comments of her teaser posts, making promises she could not ever keep. As my friend Monday put it, Marina is the only artist we’ve ever walked from entirely. She has a worse track record than Katy Perry at this point, because at least I can still listen to One of the Boys and Teenage Dream and reminisce on the glory days. But at this point, turning on The Family Jewels or Electra Heart is a painful reminder of what was, and now I am just left wondering if it ever was that good in the first place.