Review Summary: Greece’s most boring VIP party
What is pop music? That’s an admittedly difficult question to answer. Sure, characteristics that define a pop song exist, but all these external qualities —simple chord progressions, accessible, catchy melodies, easy-to-remember lyrics, repeated choruses— ring somewhat hollow. Plus, if you approach that question with the mindset that “pop music = popular music”, then I guess all styles and genres of music fit the criteria in some way? Well, scratch that question, here’s a better one: What does pop music
feel like? Another difficult question to answer, since answers vary; the feelings that pop music evokes from us are bound to be different, shaped from our own personal experiences with it. My own answer to the question? Pop music
feels like a party. An enormous party where time seems to never pass, there are drinks aplenty, the strobe lights are dizzying, any type of dancing is allowed and encouraged and, above all, everyone is invited to it. To me, pop music
feels communal.
My point is,
POP TOO doesn’t
feel like pop to me; it’s Marina’s party and you are not invited this time around.
Some context is necessary, for sure. Back in 2022, I reviewed Marina Satti’s debut album,
YENNA, noting that her artistry and sound —a hypnotic blend of Greek music, electronic elements and art-pop— has all the potential imaginable to compete with Greek and international pop artists alike. And I guess that came true, to some extent? 2024 saw Marina compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, trading her then-usual blend of sounds for ‘ZARI’, a sledgehammer-obvious mash of Greek instruments, pop-rap and neoperreo so schizophrenic that you have to listen to it again, just to convince yourself that,
yes, you did hear that. Points for genre-blending; ‘ZARI’ polarized listeners, especially Greek ones, but Marina wouldn’t have it any other way. She barely scraped the Top 10 finalists, yet her sound managed to leave an impact on eager audiences. And just a few days after the Eurovision Contest, she released an EP, titled
P.O.P., doubling down on that Greek/neoperreo fusion. I need to make this clear:
P.O.P. was, by Greek standards, a gigantic commercial success (entering the Global Spotify Debut Albums Top 10 and the Spotify Top Albums Debut UK charts during its release week) and a massive viral sensation with its myriad of quotable lines and quirky production, while also spawning a few more radio hits. My feelings towards the EP are not as enthusiastic as the general public’s, but I cannot deny that 2024 belonged to Satti and
P.O.P. for Greece.
Circling back to today,
POP TOO has similar, if not bigger, aspirations; Satti seems to want to command the Greek pop scene with her more experimental and genre-fluid music and, honestly, more power to her! She has the vocal presence and the hit songs to back that wish up. And with an album titled
POP TOO, one would expect a collection of fun, energetic, forward-thinking songs. As I mentioned before, pop music feels like a big community party, so
POP TOO should feel like that for me. But that's rarely the case.
The cracks show in many forms. Its most baffling drawback is how it betrays the artist’s guiding ethos of infusing Greek elements into her music. With very few exceptions throughout, that Greek factor, which arguably was Marina’s biggest musical asset, found in every other project of hers, is absent from the array of styles
POP TOO presents — electropop, pop-rap, neoperreo and pop-rock. I am not opposed to an all-out pop album, yet with that unique aspect of her music not present, the music this album offers pales in comparison to her contemporaries. The best song on
POP TOO embraces those Greek influences; the laid-back ‘KAVOURAKIA’ is a pop-reggae jam that evokes a Greek summer and its laissez-faire vibe provides ample space for Marina’s vocals to float and find surprisingly good company with Locomondo’s Markos Koumaris’ guest feature. Closer ‘POP (all the voices in my head)’ runs through a number of musical styles and moods, yet achieves some of the genre-blending found in last year’s
P.O.P. and contains, to a lesser extent, some of these native elements.
The rest of the songs are devoid of colorful or even competent production and after two projects where the music had a distinct personality and mood, I cannot explain such a drop in quality. Opener ‘ANATOLI’ has a good song buried within it and the willingness to experiment with pop-rock is there, yet the production and mixing is so demo-quality that the song is just grating to listen to, coupled with Marina’s vocals seesawing in quality within this very song; they’re ethereal in the verses yet weirdly off and pitchy in the choruses. ‘BLOUZAKI’ is similarly ill-conceived, a mix of 2000s indie rock, handclaps, reggaeton so garish and sloppily put together that it leaves one exhausted and confused. Its few interesting lines (“In the end, you’re not the ideal”) are undercut by a performance that does not mesh with the vibe this song is going for. The preceding slow-burner ‘AUTOKINHTO’ is admirable as a song about fleeting memories and life slipping through your fingers (“Because everything I love always leaves before I do”), but the downtempo instrumental is too bland, coasting on the same chords and not offering any backbone to support the song; the sequenced drums at the very end of the song aren’t enough to save it. ‘ELA ELA’ fares infinitely better, a collaboration with Greek rapper Saske that offers unlikely chemistry between the two and an R&B instrumental that is quite moody and sultry, if a little anonymous.
Subpar production and inconsistent vocals aside,
POP TOO is also exhausting to listen to from a lyrical stand-point; Marina is either treading already-treaded lyrical paths (my review of her debut album tackled this exact criticism) or holding up a mirror and locking eyes with her newfound fame (a topic not discussed in Greek pop). This latter theme is one of the more disappointing aspects of the album (which non-Greek speakers won’t even notice), because it makes the tracks that tackle this topic —which are, unsurprisingly, the songs that garnered the most discussion in press— outright irrelevant and boring for the audience. Current single ‘LOLA’ and ‘EPANO STO TRAPEZI’ are down there with the worst Marina has offered to-date; they are too self-obsessed and too occupied with addressing every possible criticism she has received ever since she participated in Eurovision, amplified by the fact that they are next to each other on the tracklist. Extending my previous points on the production, these particular songs are so instrumentally cold and lifeless, a long shot from how the music on last year’s
P.O.P. was, aiming for high-energy dance-pop but ending up with ‘LOLA’’s dead-on-arrival chorus. ‘EPANO STO TRAPEZI’ is even more disappointing; a few interesting production choices (e.g. the chorus instrumental) share limited space with basic and mechanical dance-pop/electro-house sections and an out-of-nowhere art-pop operatic bridge. The short runtime of the track doesn’t have the legs to support such sonic whiplash, making it a suffocating listen and devoid of any fun. One question permeates these specific tracks: Who would want to listen to these? Clunky couplets like:
(LOLA)
Spanish popstar wannabe / How does she represent our country?
What label should be put for her? / Where does she come from? /
She needs better production / Does she have a Greek ID?
(EPANO STO TRAPEZI)
Nobody's talking, they all switch channels /
Looking for something to eat, they're watching the war
lack any substance beneath them and are written purely to be taken at face-value as songs listing out every single bad comment Marina has received and combating them while looking unbothered, when the opposite is much apparent (‘EPANO STO TRAPEZI’ is supposedly about having a panic attack while facing criticism and global issues, yet doesn’t track like that with its bossy attitude and limited lyrics). With this combination of lifeless production and obsession with self-image, Marina forgot to take the poor listener along for the ride, the very first thing pop music should be doing. What type of listener is willing to listen to a song so self-centered that there is no relatability factor, especially when tied to such tepid music? On the contrary, the aforementioned ‘POP (all the voices in my head)’ spares some of its lines for this theme, yet transcends the boredom attached to it through sheer production value and a lengthier runtime that supports its stylistic switch-ups.
My biggest gripe with the album is that it feels less like a genuine body of work that the artist wanted to create and more like an album that the artist was obligated to make in order to capitalize on her momentum. That’s how we end up with so many tracks that sound rough and unfinished and with no overall cohesion when one listens to the full 30-minute project. The need to keep the Satti machine chugging along is evident in the lyrics and samples throughout
POP TOO; almost all songs spew
"iconic" lines like “Mykonos, always show up with my girls in four-inch heels” and “Comedy show, news nine o’clock” and “Give me children, they call me mother” and vocal samples straight from viral Greek moments (“I came for the life, not the information”), which are begging to become Instagram captions among young girls.
P.O.P. also had silly moments and lyrical motifs like these, but pulling that same trick twice and in such overabundance doesn’t scan as humorous or light or youthful, but as weirdly off, slightly annoying and immensely trying hard to make the song as TikTok/Instagram-able as possible. Whilst trying to emulate
P.O.P.’s formula and success, Satti forgot the production quirks, the blend of Greek styles and her vocal prowess and thus,
POP TOO ends up as a pale imitation of its predecessor; barring one or two cherry-picked moments, it’s an exhausting, tiring record that doesn’t bring anything unique to the pop game, like it aspires to.
But should I be surprised? I mean, it’s right there in the title!
P.O.P. was both a reference to the word ‘pop’ and the Greek acronym for P.D.O. (which stands for Protected Designation of Origin) and that wordplay was reflected on the musical side; the songs on that EP, while not as groundbreaking as some claim to be, were fresh and playful and experimented with unique production and vocal cadences, while still being really concise and proudly wearing their singular Greek influences. The songs were commercially successful because they were true pop songs, because they felt communal, because they felt like a party that everyone could join.
POP TOO (bearing close simile to charli xcx’s
Pop 2 in name, but not in spirit) exhibits the qualities of the worst pop music; solipsistic, redundant, try-hard and quite boring.
