Review Summary: After School EP was a body of work that separates from Martinez’s other projects due to its raw emotion and vulnerability. Quite possibly the best EP of 2020.
From breaking up with her producer boyfriend to getting fired at her bakery, Melanie Martinez has delivered the wonderful body of work that is “After School EP.” Unlike Martinez’s other projects, this EP is a step into her personal life instead of translating darker messages into the story of her character ‘Crybaby’. Ranging from hip hop, r&b, alternative rock, and classic pop, the EP boasts Martinez’s undeniable versatility.
The opening track “Notebook” delivers a bitter ambience with an instrumental that is repetitive and scandalous. She follows through with this element in her lyrics throwing brutal shots to her ex lover, releasing all bits of anger and heartbreak.
The second track “Test Me” is in her perspective of someone driven to the edge by the insufferable trials of life. The track opens with the utterance of a laugh and then goes on to accept this torment because she feels she is being tested by god.
The third track “Brain and Heart” managed to do something never done before in pop music today. Sampled from Jennifer Lopez’s “If you had my Love” , Martinez sings in the perspective of a brain and a heart. The lyrics show the conflict and the pros and cons each organs have in making decisions. The heart says “what fun is it to be so calculated?” while the brain argues “or be taken advantage of ‘cause your heart’s too trusting.” Martinez seems to end the conflict singing “pushed my head into my chest, bind them up forever wed.”
The fourth track “Numbers” is a roller coaster of emotions targeted to her strict record label and their limitations on Martinez’s creative force. The alternative rock production compliments the anger in which she is tired of being looked at as disposable, a joke, and emotionless.
The fifth track “Glued” unveils Martinez’s fears of abandonment and heartbreak. She claims feeling too ‘glued’ and connected with so many people begins to be overwhelming and worrisome. Being an upbeat lights-swinging-in-the-crowd song, the lover she is speaking to is the one she hopes can “paste [her] to a new way of being.”
The sixth track “Field Trip” Martinez releases her unbothered confidence in a world of fake material people. Being a synth r&b jam she claims she’s a bridge into the mystical world and she fends off against the people wanting to tear down the bridge by letting them know she’s on her own field trip.
The final track “The Bakery” was at most a fun project Martinez completed. Having no thematic correlation with the EP or raw emotion, the track was a less artistic piece compared to the others. Eating rainbow cookies and few religious references, the song was merely getting fired from a bakery and a generic pop tune.
