She was born on 28th April in 1995 in Astoria, Queens, the U.S. Her parents are Jose and Mery Martinez. She is of Puerto Rican and Dominican descent. At the age of 14, she taught herself how to play guitar and she wrote her first song by adding poetry to one of the chord diagrams.
In 2012, she participated in the MSG Varsity Talent Show but she was eliminated in the second round. Later that year, she gave audition for The Voice and after several months, she got a call that she had advanced to the second round. She has been eliminated in the fifth week. After the show, she started working independently and in 2013, she released her debut single, Dollhouse.
The song has been produced by NYC songwriting duo Kinetics & One Love. In 2014, she signed with Atlantic Records and she released her debut EP, Dollhouse that was certified gold by the RIAA and has been featured in the mini-series, American Horror Story: Freak Show. Her debut album, Cry Baby was released in 2015 and it debuted at number 6 on the Billboard 200.
That year, she also released a Christmas-themed single, Gingerbread Man that initially was released on SoundCloud. Her second EP, Cry Baby’s Extra Clutter was released in 2016. Her second album was K-12 that was released in 2019. In 2020, she announced her EP, After School and it would serve as a deluxe edition of K-12.
Her song, Play Date became one of the top 100 most-played songs on Spotify in the U.S. She has collaborated with a cosmetics company, Lime Crime, and released two lipsticks. Blue lipstick is called Cry Baby that was released in 2016 and the following year, she released the brown lipstick called Teddy Bear.