When the standard edition of Princess of Power was released on June 6th of this year, it was just as Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s bromance came to an expected end, with the two engaging in a petty Twitter (never X) spat as Musk pronounced what everyone has already long known—that Trump is on the Epstein list. That MARINA’s album about redefining what power (especially as it relates to love) ought to mean just as this pathetic display between two toxic men was unfurling seemed only to further emphasize what she had already stated a few years back on “Man’s World” (released as a single in 2020): “Mother Nature’s dying, nobody’s keeping score/I don’t wanna live in a man’s world anymore.”
When she had released that track, the U.S. had just regained some of its footing from the first Trump presidency. And while Joe Biden might not have been any saint or particularly competent president either, at least he wasn’t the total personification of evil. So for MARINA to have been saying such words even “back then,” well, they would only ring truer with retroactive bittersweetness in 2025. The year she told NPR, “We’ve been living in quite, like, a masculine-led world for so long. Many of us have equated power with control, manipulating people to get our needs met. That isn’t loving, to me. So I think I’ve had to, over the last decade, really, I’ve had to, like, work out what love means for myself. Particularly in relationships, too, ‘cause I think a lot of our behaviors in relationships are actually more, like, attachment-based to keep ourselves feeling secure. But that’s kind of a separate thing to what actual love is.”
Regardless of such “hippie-dippy” sentiments, it doesn’t mean MARINA can’t still revert to something akin to her Electra Heart persona (in terms of sauciness and hauteur). As she does on the first track to signal the start of the deluxe edition of Princess of Power, “Sex Is Power” (which possesses a very Robyn kind of vibe at times). This marking the third song on a MARINA album to feature the word “power.” Apart from the title track on P.O.P., this includes Electra Heart’s “Power & Control,” during which a tenor-sounding MARINA laments (or says “matter-of-factly,” depending on how you hear it), “Women and men, we are the same/But love will always be a game/We give and take a little more/Eternal game of tug and war/Power and control/I’m gonna make you fall.” However, despite wanting to be the “winner” (a motif also present on P.O.P.’s “Final Boss,” with such lyrics as, “Guess I beat you at your own game” and “You don’t like anything you can’t control”), MARINA could still admit, even in her Electra Heart guise, “A human vulnerability/Doesn’t mean that I am weak.” Indeed, with Princess of Power, there are numerous occasions during which MARINA continues to posit that vulnerability is the ultimate human strength, not weakness.
Even so, with “Sex Is Power,” it’s as though she’s back to what she once said about “Power & Control”: “[In] relationships… there’s always a power struggle. In the relationships that I’ve had, one person or the other wants the upper hand and I find that interesting, how in any relationship really, it’s quite rare for both people to feel equal. I guess that’s when it’s right, when both people don’t feel that one’s the weak one or the strong one.” But during “Sex Is Power,” the strong one is definitely MARINA, who announces herself soon after the thumping bassline, produced by MARINA, CJ Baran and Nick Trapani, immediately kicks off the track. She then repeats, “We’re in power mode.” And this time, MARINA wants to be the one in control, already knowing full well that she is the “hotter” party in the dynamic. This much being made clear as she flexes, “I can see you watching me/You know I’m out of your reach/No, baby, don’t speak to me/I don’t fuck with your energy.”
She subsequently goads, “Baby, don’t you know that I got that power?” However, as something of an update to “Power & Control,” MARINA takes the listener by surprise when she sings, “Baby, shut your mouth [how very David Bowie on “China Girl”], put your body on mine.” So no, this isn’t a song about being too hot for someone who’s ogling you; it’s about, in essence, dominating a man in the bedroom the same way that he would expect to dominate a woman. But the truth, as anyone not in denial knows, is that pussy is what runs the world (ergo the phrase, “pussy power”). Or, as MARINA sings, “Every woman knows that the world is ours/‘Cause everybody knows that sex is power.”
MARINA also exudes her masculine energy with the sexual innuendo, “Rainin’ down on you like an April shower/Comin’ out your mouth, keep it sweet and sour [side note: MARINA did already say, “I lived the sweet and I lived the sour” on the album’s title track]/Burnin’ inside me, an eternal flower.” And yet, in spite of her “masc-ness” here, in another verse, she speculates, “Think you might be scared of me/My ultra-femininity.” This is why, MARINA insists, most men “try to make me feel [their] shame.” Which is why, “Now the bird has flown the cage.” Not content to leave the animal metaphors at that, MARINA then reverts to the butterfly imagery of “Butterfly” by adding, “I’ve been stuck in chrysalis/Like a bloody butterfly/I had to grow new wings to fly/Fly away and escape/From your hands.”
On that note, it’s only right that “Sex Is Power” should lead into “How to Say Goodbye” (perhaps a natural offshoot of “How to Be a Heartbreaker”). To complement the somberness of MARINA’s tone on it, the track is a slower jam that finds her announcing, “Don’t wanna have to pretend to be someone you like/Don’t wanna have to defend the way I live my life/I’m sad when you pull away/I see that you don’t care/‘Cause you just wanna play games/But you never play fair.” So it is that, in one fell swoop, this verse reiterates the themes of both “Digital Fantasy” and “Final Boss.” On the former track, MARINA accuses, “Want a digital fantasy/You don’t even want the real me/Say it honestly/You don’t want real love.” This theme shines through again on “How to Say Goodbye” with the line, “I wanted reality/But you prefer the fantasy.”
In another instance of MARINA laying out the reasons she must bid this frog adieu, she tells him, “‘Cause you don’t really want my love/You just wanna fill your cup.” This, too, channels some “Digital Fantasy” energy, specifically the line, “Baby, you just want my light/Maybe you’re just a parasite.” Reemphasizing certain imagery and motifs also arrives yet again in the form of “flying” (de facto, a butterfly), with MARINA pronouncing, “I can see your life is rotten/Now I’m learning how to fly.” And as she learns how to do this on her own, she learns something else from the no-good cad she’s addressing: “So let down and so forgotten/You don’t want me in your life/Best thing that you ever taught me/Showed me how to say goodbye.”
In many ways, the track does mirror the plain “Goodbye” that closes out the standard edition of Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land (which also eventually got a deluxe version). Yet, in contrast to “How to Say Goodbye,” “Goodbye” wasn’t just about bidding farewell to a love that couldn’t endure, but also to a version of oneself that can no longer endure in the same relationship. In both songs, MARINA embodies a bittersweet mixture of sadness and self-empowerment (much like Madison Beer on her recent single called, what else, “Bittersweet”). But a woman must “power through,” as it were, if she’s to be able to move on from yet another frog.
So it is that the very Daft Punk-meets-Justice-sounding intro to “Key to the Castle” resets the somber aura of “How to Say Goodbye,” establishing MARINA’s tone of confidence and control once more. With a trumpeting intro befitting any princess’ entry into a room, MARINA proceeds to take her ex-lover to task with the prophecy, “You’ll never get the key to the castle.” Obviously, that phrase has a very overt double meaning, especially considering that medieval princesses were once subject to wearing chastity belts—or so the lore goes. And it’s a potential myth that MARINA is only too ready to play up in this particular track, which, yet again, admonishes a man for being such a raging disappointment (in any century). For example, “Now it’s so easy to identify/That you’re never gonna be the giving type/This isn’t love on a silver screen/You want a woman, but you can’t play games with me.”
And so, there it is again, MARINA incorporating her game metaphors and allusions. This now in addition to her medieval times ones as she sings, “We play the king and queen of hearts/Go get the cavalry before you show your cards/Ridin’ away on your stallion [a nod to “Metallic Stallion”].” And, like chastity belts themselves, MARINA comes to the conclusion, “It was something mythological/Could’ve been lovers, yeah, we could’ve had it all.” Instead, this man had to go ahead and show his true colors rather than showing her something like a fairy-tale ending.
The pendulum swings back to the other side of the emotional and tonal spectrum again with “Unfamiliar Heavens.” A more full-on ballad than “How to Say Goodbye,” MARINA takes on her most serious subject of the entire record: the relationship she has (or had) with her father. In other words, the relationship that sets the tone for every romantic dalliance a woman will have later on in life. Wasting no time in pulling at the listener’s heartstrings, MARINA recounts, “I couldn’t imagine life without your love, love/I don’t know what happened, but I never got enough/Grew up as a young girl without your love, love, love, love/Grew up in the mountains, wrapped around me like a hug.” It’s at this point that MARINA starts to serve up some major Lana Del Rey lyrical vibes in terms of alluding to the place where she grew up and the strained relationship she had with a parent (in Del Rey’s case, that was her mother).
But the “hinterlands” of Brynmawr, Wales probably usurp Lake Placid for serving up a unique kind of lonely feeling to an artistic soul. What’s more, MARINA’s parents had separated when she was four years old, with her Greek father moving back to Greece at the time, and leaving MARINA and her sister to be raised in Wales by their mother. Thus, no wonder MARINA would clinch the notion that “Unfamiliar Heavens” is about her father with the lines, “And you were ever distant, and I felt so ashamed/You didn’t seem to love me, but we shared the same last name.”
As she continues to ruminate on the lack of love she felt during her formative years, MARINA croons, “Didn’t think I deserved to be loved, loved, loved, loved/Till I left my hometown, set myself free like a dove [in lieu of a butterfly this time].” And thank God or whoever that she did, otherwise the “Diamonds” never would have known her.
It’s not all regret and resentment on this track though. In fact, quite the opposite as MARINA delivers the hopeful chorus, “Unfamiliar heavens/Are slowly opening/I see them in the distance/And the color of the sky is changing/It’s finally over/It’s in the past now.” To be sure, in order to move on from the past, MARINA knows she must let it go, adding, “And now, my heart has changed/So I let go of the pain.”
But that doesn’t mean this Princess of Power would shy away from rounding out the deluxe with the “Everybody Knows I’m Sad (Remix),” which is only a “remix” in that it now features ABsolutely, who contributes the new verse, “Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing this life thing right/All the hours I’m losing refusing to leave all my worries behind/I wanna surrender, I wanna let in a love so real/I wanna know what it’s like to be held and be healed and finally feel.” Perhaps, with the assist of these additional tracks on the deluxe edition of Princess of Power, others might learn how to do just that.
