Over the years, Diamandis’s albums have revealed an intriguing if uneasy dialogue with her own pop persona, beginning with “The Family Jewels,” which showcased her impressive vocal range and heralded a confident, unpredictable new artist. Growing up in a small town in Wales, Diamandis said she never demonstrated any aptitude for music, except for singing Oasis’s “Wonderwall” once when she was 9 “by the fireplace like a little Victorian child.” As a teenager, she moved to her father’s native Greece and recalled returning with “a burning, raging urge to be a singer.” She began writing and releasing music on Myspace. “Songwriting is the best cure,” she added. Her candy-striped sundress accommodated the stifling April weather, and she covered her inky black hair with a straw hat. “On ‘Goodbye’ I was crying so hard as I was writing it that I actually couldn’t record the demo properly,” she said during a stroll near her home. “I knew it needed to be a sock in the face.” “On ‘Purge,’ I wasn’t trying to be nice,” Decilveo added. With a singsong rhythm punctuated by snare drums, Diamandis impersonates Mother Nature avenging human failures on “Purge the Poison,” including capitalism, racism, pollution, Harvey Weinstein and the treatment of her beloved Britney Spears. “She’s the real deal and, in this strange pop market, it’s refreshing to have somebody with lyrics that are going against the grain.” “This is going to sound taboo, but I was drawn to the fact that Marina’s a woman, and I’m one of the only female producers in the business, and we spoke each other’s language,” Decilveo said in a phone interview. Decilveo and Diamandis, who teamed on those first two singles, wrote music together at Diamandis’s West Hollywood home over Sunbasket meal-kit dishes that she had prepared. Sifting through recommendations from fans and friends, she formed a team that included Gavillet, the photographer Coughs and the producer Jennifer Decilveo, who has worked with Beth Ditto and Bat for Lashes. In 2019, Diamandis put out a call on social media looking for female collaborators. Across this album, there’s such a yearning for a focus on the feminine.” “The way that we treat people is linked to our connection to the planet,” she said while discussing its second single, the propulsive “Purge the Poison.” (It also has a remix featuring Pussy Riot.) “It’s all tied to a degrading of femininity. The ambitious “Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land” is another kind of calibration. Three more albums followed between 20 that saw Diamandis wrestling with embracing and rejecting the mandates of the industry - striving for mainstream acceptance then pulling back, making music with the flavor of an indie artist in a major label ecosystem.
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