成为凡人 (2019)

Love + Fear is the fourth studio album by Welsh singer-songwriter Marina Diamandis, and her first under the mononym Marina. It was released in full on 26 April 2019 by Atlantic and Neon Gold Records, though the album's first half was surprise released on 4 April 2019. Marina took a hiatus after she concluded touring in support of her third studio album Froot (2015) with plans to retire from music. However, she began working on a new record with several producers, including Sam de Jong, Oscar Görres, Joel Little, Jack Patterson, Mark Ralph, James Flannigan, and Oscar Holter during its recording.

Musically, Love + Fear has been described musically as a pop, dance-pop, synth-pop, and electropop album with a more commercial sound, in comparison to Marina's previous albums. Conceived as a double album, each half of the album explores the two nominal emotions referenced in the title, according to the theory by psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Love + Fear received generally mixed reviews from music critics and debuted at number five on the UK Albums Chart, becoming the singer's fourth consecutive top ten album.

The album was supported by five singles: "Handmade Heaven", "Superstar", "Orange Trees", "To Be Human", and "Karma". It also includes the previously released single "Baby" (2018) with Clean Bandit. The album was announced alongside a tour, which visited the US, Canada, and Europe, which began in April 2019 and concluded in November. An acoustic EP, titled Love + Fear (Acoustic), was released on 13 September 2019.

Background and production

After concluding the Neon Nature Tour in promotion of her third studio album Froot (2015), Marina began writing sessions in Los Angeles for her next record, despite initially dismissing the idea of making a follow-up. In June 2016, she told Fuse that she had begun writing new material for upcoming songs. However, the sessions were cancelled because of her plans to retire from music, in search of new creative inspiration. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Marina recalled realising that her passion for music had shifted, saying, "I remember thinking, oh sh—, this doesn't feel the same", and described feeling a growing apathy that made her question her motivation as an artist. She reflected that she no longer needed external validation and wondered, "Why am I doing this, then, if I'm not doing it from a place of ego?" concluding that after three albums, she thought, "that's enough." In another interview, she elaborated that following nearly a decade of work, she had started to feel that too much of her sense of self was tied to her artistic identity, which led her to temporarily step back from music and focus on reconnecting with herself. Marina cited her struggles with depression and stress due the loss of her aunt and her grandmother during promotion for Froot as the main reasons of her near retirement. She also experienced writer's block, which led her to take acting classes. However, Marina left those classes and enrolled at the University of London where she studied psychology for six months. She described the experience as a way to explore another passion and "feel like a human being again", noting that her long-term obsession with being an artist since the age of 15 had consumed much of her life.

Three months after finishing the course, the singer returned to the studio and continued with the songwriting of her fourth album from early 2017 to summer 2018. Some of the songs made before her break were initially instrumented only by piano but were reworked after Marina "[fell] back in love with them." The singer was inactive in social media during her hiatus, though she uploaded content occasionally. In December 2016, electronic group Clean Bandit confirmed that "Disconnect", a song they had performed with Marina at the 2015 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, would be released on their new album; it was released as a single in June 2017 and she performed it with them at Glastonbury. When Marina thought in May 2018 that the album was already finished, she wrote several songs in a trip to Sweden.

To mark a new stage in her career, Marina announced via Twitter in 2018 that she would be dropping her "and the Diamonds" moniker to release music as "Marina" (stylised in all caps), explaining that "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 later elaborated that returning to songwriting felt deeply personal, saying that it was as if "something had cleared" within her. Marina explained that continuing under the name "Marina and the Diamonds" felt like constructing an artificial idea of herself, adding that she no longer wanted to be "locked behind a persona" or tied to the pop star concept of a tightly defined "era". Instead, she emphasised a desire to feel "more human", stating that there was "no concept other than love and fear."