Album: Marina and the Diamonds, Electra Heart (679/Atlantic)

From opening track, “Bubblegum Bitch”, onwards, Marina and the Diamonds' second album promotes the more mean-spirited and synthetic aspects of childhood aspiration.

Over brutish electro-stomps and fizzy pop trifles every bit as sickly as that suggests, Marina's shrill Violet Elizabeth Bott inflections proclaim her emptiness: “Primadonna” and the perversely triumphalist “Homewrecker” celebrate selfish bitchiness, while vast tracts of the album – “Starring Role”, “The State of Dreaming”, “Living Dead” and more – depict a life of theatrical pretence leading to alienation and feeling “super-super-suicidal”. Ironically, what masquerades as self-knowledge simply serves to conceal the real reasons why she ends up mired in “Fear and Loathing”.

Download: Bubblegum Bitch