Melanie Martinez

From Baldwin to a three-chair turn

Melanie Adele Martinez was born on 28 April 1995 in Astoria, Queens, to Mery and Jose Martinez, a family of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, and moved to Baldwin on Long Island when she was four. She reached a national audience before she had left school. In 2012, during her junior year, she auditioned for the third season of The Voice with Britney Spears's Toxic, turned three chairs, chose Adam Levine as her coach and survived to the top six before elimination.

The show gave her a following but not a deal. That came on 7 April 2014, when she signed to Atlantic Records. The Dollhouse EP followed in May 2014, and its title track has since been certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The template was set early: childlike surfaces, adult subject matter, and a visual identity she controlled herself.

Cry Baby, K-12, Portals: three albums, one world

Cry Baby, her debut album, arrived in 2015 and entered the Billboard 200 at number six. It has since gone double platinum, and Pity Party, Soap and Play Date each earned platinum certifications. The record introduced the Cry Baby character, a persona Martinez has carried, in one form or another, through every project since.

K-12 followed in 2019, reaching number three on the Billboard 200 and arriving with a feature-length film of the same name that Martinez wrote and directed, an unusual degree of authorial control for a pop artist of her size at the time. Portals, in 2023, went one place higher, peaking at number two, and introduced a new character persona to mark a change of artistic direction. Her visual work earned an MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Visual Effects in 2023; Forbes had placed her on its 30 Under 30 list two years earlier.

The Trilogy Tour of 2024 was the point at which her live business caught up with her streaming numbers. Built around songs from all three albums, it sold out arenas and included two consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden; Pollstar reported the pair grossed $2,707,333 from 28,903 tickets. The run also took her to The O2 in London, the room she returns to this week.

Hades: a cracked mirror

Hades, her fourth studio album, was released through Atlantic on 27 March 2026. It runs to eighteen tracks and just over seventy minutes, with production from CJ Baran, Halo Boy, Justin Greenwood, Arthur Besna and Malay. Martinez has framed it as the first half of a double project: Hades is the dystopian record, its counterpart the utopian one. She has described the album as a cracked mirror held up to the present rather than a vision of a distant future, an examination of destructive power structures that already exist. Speaking on the TODAY plaza on 26 June 2026 she put it more plainly, saying the world feels very dystopian so she wanted to make a dystopian record. The same appearance was where she confirmed the second half's title, Elysium, which she called a utopian reference and the counterpart to Hades.

The rollout began with Possession on 28 January 2026, followed by Disney Princess on 25 February, Uncanny Valley on release day and The Vatican on 22 May. The album introduced a new character, Circle, who carries the story on stage as well as on record. Commercially it did what its predecessors did: number three on the Billboard 200 on 84,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, number one on Billboard's Top Rock and Alternative Albums chart, and number five on the UK Albums Chart.

Critics were more divided than fans. Metacritic's aggregate sits at 74, with Variety scoring it 92 and AllMusic four stars out of five, while Rolling Stone gave it three and a half and Slant a dismissive one and a half. That spread is typical of Martinez's reception: the ambition is rarely in dispute, the tone often is.

The Sacrifice on the road

The tour was announced on 16 April 2026 as Hades: The Sacrifice, a 26-date arena run promoted by Live Nation, with an artist presale on 22 April and general sale on 24 April. Martinez said at the time that when writing Hades she knew the tour would have to be immersive and cinematic, that it was very different to anything she had done before, and that it involved more practical elements and camera illusions. She added that creating a new character, and thinking about how that character would perform in this new world, was what excited her.

The North American leg was originally listed to open on 15 July in St Paul; in the event the first show was 17 July at the Allstate Arena in Rosemont, outside Chicago, before Detroit, Hamilton, Boston, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Charlotte, Duluth, Orlando, Dallas, Austin, Monterrey, Mexico City and Phoenix, closing on 14 August at the Kia Forum in Inglewood. The European leg opened at Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome on 9 September 2026 and continues to The O2 in London on 11 September, with doors at 6.30pm, and Co-op Live in Manchester on 12 September, then Paris, Milan, Frankfurt, Brussels, Krakow and Prague before a final night at Hamburg's Barclays Arena on 26 September. It is her first major tour since 2024.

What a show looks like now

The defining fact of the show is what it leaves out. Across the eighteen dates setlist.fm counted for its 2026 average, the set has been the Hades album in full, in order, and nothing else: no Cry Baby, no K-12, no Portals. The average set runs to twenty items including a taped intro and a single encore. Garbage opened seventeen of those shows; The Last Two People on Earth closed every one of them, delivered from the secondary stage.

At Boston's TD Garden on 21 July the running order moved between an A-stage and a B-stage deeper in the arena: the first six songs on the main stage, Grudges through Weight Watchers on the B-stage, with Avoidant sung alongside a fan brought up from the crowd, then back to the A-stage for The Plague through Chatroom. Most songs were preceded by spoken-word interludes narrated in character as Circle, and The Vatican carried an extended dance break.

V13's Kenzie Magnan, reviewing that sold-out Boston date, called it theatre as much as pop, with fake blood and body horror throughout, dancers who never let up in a display of stamina that anchored the show's more chaotic flourishes, and moments by turns genuinely unsettling and bombastically funny; the crowd chanted every word back. Ticketmaster's tour guide, updated 20 July, listed Haute & Freddy and Isabel LaRosa as support and noted VIP packages that include a pre-show meditation narrated by Martinez. An arena tour built on a four-month-old album with no old hits is a risk; on the evidence of the North American reviews, the staging carries it.