Melanie Martinez’s “HADES Tour” Bewitches Boston [Photos]

Melanie Martinez doesn’t do concerts so much as she stages fever dreams, and Tuesday (July 21st, 2026) night’s sold-out stop on the HADES: THE SACRIFICE tour was proof that her fourth act might be her most ambitious yet. Performing her new album HADES front to back — all 18 brooding tracks, no throwback detours — Martinez asked a lot of a Boston weeknight crowd and got every bit of it back.

From the churning open of “GARBAGE” through the taunting “IS THIS A CULT?” and the seething “WHITE BOY WITH A GUN,” the set moved at a relentless, unbroken pace. Martinez and her dancers never let up, a display of stamina that anchored the show’s more chaotic flourishes. And there were plenty: her signature campy-horror vocabulary of fake blood, body horror, and psychological warfare played out in tableaus that were by turns genuinely unsettling and bombastically funny.

Highlights “DISNEY PRINCESS,” “MONOPOLY MAN,” and the towering “MONOLITH” showed how much of Martinez’s storytelling lives in the seams between lyric and staging. It’s theater as much as pop, and for the devoted crowd chanting every word back, exactly the ritual they came for.