Melanie Martinez

Known for her elaborately stylized Cry Baby persona, Melanie Martinez has established a singular presence within pop music by shaping intricate, frequently somber anthems drawn from adolescent experiences and layered with folk, electronic, and hip-hop textures. She first attracted listeners as a participant on The Voice in 2012, then fully realized her conceptual approach with the Top Ten debut Cry Baby in 2015. The 2019 follow-up K-12 extended the Cry Baby narrative, and both albums reached the summit of the Top Alternative Albums chart. After a lengthy absence, she resurfaced in 2023 with PORTALS.

Martinez entered the world in Astoria, Queens, New York, in 1995 and spent her formative years on Long Island within a household of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. Describing herself as an emotionally sensitive youngster, she found limited outlets for self-expression amid her family's conventional environment and gravitated toward poetry, visual art, and music from an early age. After mastering the guitar on her own, she became proficient at performing covers and composing original material by her teenage years. Still enrolled in high school in 2012, she secured a place on NBC's The Voice by delivering Britney Spears' "Toxic." Opting for Adam Levine's team, she advanced until week five, when viewer votes led to her elimination. She then turned to independent work, issuing the Kinetics- and One Love-produced Dollhouse EP on Atlantic Records in 2014. The following year brought her first full-length release, Cry Baby, which included the tracks "Pity Party" and "Sippy Cup." That album climbed to number six on the Billboard 200 while claiming the top position on Billboard's Top Alternative Albums tally.

She promptly began developing the successor, though repeated postponements kept the project unfinished until 2018. During that period she also completed a feature-length film intended to accompany the music. Issued in September 2019, K-12 picked up the Cry Baby saga that had defined her debut. The set once more topped the Top Alternative Albums chart and reached number three on the Billboard 200. In 2020 she delivered the After School EP—originally packaged with the deluxe edition of K-12—alongside independent singles such as the dreamy, harp-driven "Fire Drill" and the upbeat "Play Date."

Emerging from a two-year break, Martinez unveiled her third album, PORTALS, in March 2023. Crafted in collaboration with C.J. Baran, the record introduced the atmospheric, string-and-electronics single "Death."