Erotic Market

What do deities have in common, if not that they work on our destinies in secret? From one album to the next, from one concert to another, Erotic Market has always offered music with a healing magic. While this recipe has remained intact since the beginning, the artist now presents a new alchemy that, beyond the deepest wounds, soothes and heals—taking shape in what may be her most beautiful album yet, Marla Pillow, set for release in early 2025.

Behind her fringe and a name that plays with the commodification of bodies, Marine Pellegrini has more than nine albums to her credit with N’Relax and Polymorphie, her former projects. Musicality, rhythm, and melody come so instinctively to her that one might think she emerged from a precious music box. Erudite across genres—especially jazz, trip-hop, and electronic music—the artist, whose soul-infused voice seems inherited from a bygone century, appears to build her universe in a secret place, sheltered from the gaze of the industry: a kind of mysterious cabin at the back of the garden—a world where Lana Del Rey, Lianne La Havas, and Julia Stone might have merged.

Marine Pellegrini, aka Erotic Market, is one of those artists who have laid themselves bare before their audience in the name of an inner struggle. The one who takes the stage is, above all, the modest young girl who impulsively began studying music theory after her philosophy studies; the shy teenage tomboy obsessed with Erykah Badu and the Fugees; the enchanting artist whose words matter and whose punk impulses no longer need to raise their voice to be heard. Over time, her candor has become an unstoppable musical tool: with a steady voice and carefully chosen words, Erotic Market preserves what is most untamed in her use of percussion, her weathered timbre, and her metaphors that seem to have escaped from poetry notebooks.

From her self-titled Erotic Market to Blahblahrians, Queendoms, Boredoms, and Boredoms & Heartstrings—the latter a reinterpretation of Boredoms with a string quartet—through to Marla Pillow, her new album, she transforms her intimate revolts and warmly challenges a cold, mechanical contemporary era, questioning our ways of being in the world, in love, and in society. Yet it is her affirmation of a proudly ordinary femininity—reassuring yet no less regal—that has led her to Marla Pillow, her new double, her doppelgänger. It is this very figure that now allows her to tell, in a single gesture, the story of motherhood and the loss of a mother, the transformation of mud into gold, and the acceptance and resilience felt upon waking from a night of intertwined dreams.

Always in motion, the artist—who now listens to Frank Ocean, SZA, Luidji, and Disiz—has begun performing on theater stages and spent two months at La Ciergerie studio with her co-composer Romain Montiel, a multi-instrumentalist trained at the CNSMD in Lyon, and producer Julien Jussey, a classically trained pianist and long-time collaborator, to find the enchanting formula of Marla Pillow. With this organic album promising gentle pagan celebrations, Erotic Market marks a radiant and abundant return to light.