‘FROOT’: Behind Marina’s Refreshing Third Act

Electra Heart had been Diamandis’ attempt to be “a straight-up pop star”, she said. “[But] when I was promoting it, I realised, OK, this is why I don’t like being a pop star because people assume you don’t know anything and you don’t make your own music. I saw that change as soon as I dyed my hair blonde and created music that had a different production style. It was fascinating but it made me think: I’m not going to do this again.”

FROOT was a different type of project from the start. While several writers and producers worked on Electra Heart, for FROOT Diamandis wrote on her own, and worked in the studio solely with producer David Kosten. Her confidence in her songwriting had grown, and she has said that, with this album, “Maybe I was ready to change. Maybe I was ready to leave a lot of things I’d held on to in the past behind.”

What is the ‘FROOT’ album about?

If Electra Heart was consciously about character and artifice, FROOT was about “reflection”, as Diamandis put it. “It’s also centred around extremely different things,” she said in 2014. “Half of the album is about a relationship that I had to end. It’s not something I feel good about, and it’s not something I’d really addressed before in my songwriting. In pop music in general it’s always this spurned ex-lover type of thing, but this time it wasn’t that at all. It was more like the guilt that you have to deal with that comes from hurting someone else. It’s just as hard as being rejected or dumped.”

The song I’m A Ruin deals with this in an explicit way. Featuring one of Diamandis’ strongest-ever lyrics, it fits into similar lyrical territory as River by Joni Mitchell (from Mitchell’s landmark 1971 album, Blue). Both songs explore the guilt, selfishness and sadness of one party ending a relationship, with Diamandis drawing on real experiences for I’m A Ruin. “It’s horrendous, but at the same time you can’t not write honestly,” she said.

Other songs on the album deal with broader “human condition” topics, as Diamandis has put it. The most lyrically powerful of these tracks is Savages: a sad, angry survey of human beings’ capacity for violence. It was inspired by contemporary news events, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and 2012 gang rapes and murders in Delhi. Diamandis described the song as “summing up everything that I’ve been hearing in the news for the past two years. I find it so unnerving, not so much because it was happening, but because it’s natural and that’s what people never talk about.”

What was the “Froot Of The Month” campaign?

Before she released FROOT, Diamandis put out a song a month. “I came up with the ‘Froot Of The Month’ strategy to enable me to release the music I wanted to, as opposed to what might work commercially,” she tweeted, explaining her decision. Her innovative drip-drip approach to releasing music from FROOT ensured that each song would be heard on its own terms. No “Froot Of The Month” was lost or left in the shade, as can happen with songs on a more traditional album release.

The first “Froot Of The Month” was the album’s title track. This, as Diamandis explained, was one of the final songs to be written for FROOT, and it featured a lyric she found particularly difficult – although ultimately extremely satisfying – to write. “Froot just symbolises something really positive,” she said. “You plant a seed, a tree grows, it bears fruit, that is the cycle of our lives. I feel like I’ve got to that point where I feel fully realised as a musician. I’ve never felt like that before.”

Happy was the next “Froot Of The Month”, and was followed by Immortal, I’m A Ruin, Forget and Gold. Accompanying the releases were limited-edition coloured-vinyl 7” singles, each one matching one of the colours of FROOT’s logo.

What did Marina do after ‘FROOT’?

Following the release of FROOT, Diamonds stripped back the songs Froot, Happy and I’m A Ruin for the FROOT Acoustic EP, which she released in June 2015. This was a self-released project, originally made available through Diamandis’ MySpace page.

Diamandis also began preparing for her next live shows. This became Neon Nature, the third Marina And The Diamonds world tour, and it began in October 2015. Every show was divided into three acts, with each act dedicated to a specific Marina and The Diamonds album; this, she said, was because “each era has such a defined look that it didn’t make sense for me to mix them”. FROOT was Act Three, with Diamandis’ debut album, The Family Jewels, making for Act One and Electra Heart Act Two.

Ultimately, FROOT, too, was an era, just as each of the albums before it had been. For Diamandis’ next release, there would be another new dawn: the “Diamonds” part of her professional name would be retired, leaving just Marina. “It took me well over a year to figure out that a lot of my identity was tied up in who I was as an artist… and there wasn’t much left of who I was,” she said at the release of her 2019 album, Love + Fear, explaining her name change.

It all makes FROOT, the final statement of Marina And The Diamonds, and written entirely by Diamandis, particularly poignant. “That’s the most important thing about this album, and definitely the most personal thing,” Diamandis said in 2015. “It’s kind of something that you wanted to do, but you don’t know if you can do it. Then you finally do it, and you’re like, I knew I could!”

Check out the full story behind ‘The Family Jewels’