Melanie Martinez built a reputation on the unsettling. Her first two albums, Cry Baby and K-12, were concept records that used a child’s aesthetic to process adult pain, and they found an audience that understood exactly what she was doing. HADES, her fourth studio album, takes that sensibility to a new plane, literally, and the results are strange and compelling in equal measure.

The album introduces a new conceptual world built around mythology and the underworld, which could easily tip into theatrical excess. It does not. Martinez exercises more control over the dramatics here than she did on her earlier records, which means the songs are allowed to breathe in a way that K-12 sometimes prevented. The production is still dense, still layered, still a little bit ominous, but there are moments of genuine space that make the stranger corners feel earned.

The best tracks are the ones where the concept recedes slightly and the emotional core shows through. There are songs on HADES that are genuinely about grief, about transformation, about the thing that happens when you survive something you were not sure you would survive. Martinez has been through a very public period of controversy and silence since K-12, and the album does not address any of that directly, but the texture of what it feels like to rebuild something is all over the record.

She is still not a vocalist in the conventional sense. Her voice is a stylistic instrument more than a technical one, which divides listeners and always has. Here it works in her favor. The vocal choices on some of the mid-album tracks are unusual enough to feel like decisions rather than limitations, and the production is constructed around those choices rather than smoothed over them.

The 18-track length is a problem, as it is for most 18-track albums. There is a version of HADES that runs about twelve songs and is genuinely excellent. At full length, the middle section loses some of its tension, and a few tracks feel like they exist to serve the concept rather than the listener. This is a common trap for conceptual records, and Martinez falls into it without fully disappearing into it.

What saves HADES is the ambition underneath the aesthetic. Martinez is not interested in giving you what you already liked about her earlier work. She is pushing into territory that does not have a clear audience or a clear precedent in her own catalog. That is the move of someone who could easily have made Cry Baby 2 and sold a lot of records. The choice to not do that is worth something, even when the results are uneven.

The album closes in a way that feels genuinely conclusive, which is rarer than it should be in modern releases. It ends like it meant to end, not like it ran out of ideas. That alone puts it above a lot of records coming out in a week that was crowded with new music. HADES is not for everyone. It was not designed to be. That is exactly why it works as often as it does.