Melanie Martinez - Portals (LP) - Bloodshot Translucent Vinyl

Melanie Martinez’s third album, Portals, lands like a fairy tale pulled through a wormhole. Released on 31 March 2023 through Atlantic, it lifts the curtain on a new chapter where her Cry Baby persona is reborn as a pink, four-eyed nymph, and the music follows suit. The palette is lush and mossy, full of rubbery bass, chiming keys and rubber-band percussion that feels part nursery rhyme, part underworld procession. It is pop, sure, but it keeps sneaking off into psychedelic corners, which suits a record obsessed with endings that are really beginnings.

The opening track, Death, feels like a rite. The vocal stacks come in cave-like layers, and the arrangement shape-shifts from lullaby to storm. It sets the tone for the whole record, which treats hooks as spells and bridges as portals. Void arrives early and hits harder than you’d expect. Martinez wrote and produced that one herself, and you can hear the control in the negative space. The beat breathes. Guitars scratch at the edges. When the chorus opens up, it is like a skylight cracking, and the lyrics about falling into your own head bite in a way that sticks.

Across Portals, the production detail rewards repeat listens. Spider Web threads glitchy vocal snippets into a swinging rhythm that feels like a carousel gone off its axis. Nymphology is playful and sharp, lit by a snare that snaps and a sassy spoken-word section that had fans quoting lines before the tour even kicked off. Evil carries one of the album’s clearest choruses, a proper shout-along that stops just short of tantrum and lands in catharsis. Then there is Faerie Soiree, where synths sparkle like dew and a wobbling bassline keeps things from floating away. Even the more intimate moments, like Light Shower, are thick with texture. You can almost hear the prosthetics and costume rustle in the vocal takes, which suits the theatre of the project.

Martinez has always built worlds around her records. Cry Baby mapped childhood wounds to candy-coated nightmares. K-12 spilled that aesthetic into a feature film. Portals goes deeper into lore and, crucially, lets the songs carry the story without skits or detours. The big conceit is rebirth, but the writing is grounded in body-level detail. Moon Cycle turns a topic most pop stars avoid into a sly, percussive chant. Battle of the Larynx plays with the idea of losing your voice while flexing the exact opposite. Womb closes the loop with a slow bloom of strings and synths that feels like lights up in a small theatre when the actors come back for a bow.

Commercially, it hit hard. Portals debuted at number two on the US Billboard 200, a career high at the time, and its rollout of singles and striking visuals gave it serious staying power. The Portals Tour that followed leaned into full fantasy, with Martinez performing in elaborate creature prosthetics that made the gig feel halfway between a pop show and immersive theatre. If you caught the setlists circulating online, you know that Void and Evil became crowd eruptions.

If you are the type who lives for sleeves and centre labels, the vinyl presentation suits the music. There were several colour variants at release, including retailer exclusives, which sent collectors on a hunt. Portals vinyl feels like the right way to hear this album, with the low end blooming and the stacked harmonies breathing a little wider. If you are searching for Melanie Martinez vinyl, keep an eye out for those editions and don’t sleep on the represses. It is the kind of record that vanishes from bins, then reappears with new hype. You can buy Melanie Martinez records online easily enough, but I still suggest a dig at your favourite Melbourne record store if you are local. There is something about finding Melanie Martinez albums on vinyl in the wild that fits the myth-making. For those further out, plenty of vinyl records Australia retailers stock it and ship fast.

Portals won’t convert everyone who struggles with Martinez’s theatrics, but it makes a strong case for her as a pop auteur. The melodies are stickier, the themes feel lived-in, and the sonic world is cohesive without getting claustrophobic. It is a trip worth taking end to end, preferably with the needle down and the room dim. On the other side, you come out blinking, a little changed, which is the whole point of a portal.