Brief:

Poppy powerfully delivers an unmistakably Metal album with strong production and complex lyricism. A lot of the songs are also just catchy as hell. 

Album Review: Weak 8/10

Big Yes: they’re all around us, crystallized, push go, nothing, the center’s falling out, negative spaces, surviving on defiance, halo 

Big No: NONE!

Listen to it on Spotify

The Review

Poppy is a name that many chronically online folks who frequented the more eclectic regions of YouTube back in the mid-2010s would recognize. Beginning as a peculiar and frankly unsettling form of performance art on YouTube in 2014, Poppy has been an interesting figure in pop culture. An odd but kind of accurate portrait of what internet culture was like during that time, Moriah Rose Pereira wouldn’t start releasing music under the Poppy moniker until a year later. The coming years saw Poppy’s popularity and relevance grow both as an internet phenomenon and as a music artist. I’ll admit that the peculiarity and slight creepiness of the Poppy character turned me away from any sort of serious artistic output she had. I wasn’t interested. Fast forward to 2019 however, and Poppy’s career would undergo a significant shift. Allegations of abuse and copyright infringement arose of Titanic Sinclair, the man behind the Poppy project. The world would discover the abuse Moriah and former collaborator Mars Argo went through under Sinclair and in December 2019, Moriah parted ways with him amidst her promotional run for her upcoming album, I Disagree. 

The album was released in January 2020 and marked a very important shift for Poppy’s musical career. An ambitious and experimental blend of pop and industrial alt-metal, the album brought a lot of new positive attention to Poppy. The album carried a very meta narrative; one that was very tied to the Poppy persona and the things she had to suffer through with Sinclair. The writing on the album showed an artist with a knack for conveying complex themes and emotions through abstract lyricism sung beautifully over aggressive and abrasive instrumentals. The album was unique in that the different elements brought to the table were distinct from one another, but they came together like a synchronous harmony. It began a very bright new chapter for her career. 

Following the major success of I Disagree was several smaller projects that were still metal-adjacent. From the fantastically unhinged Eat EP to the more youthful bedroom rock of Flux, Poppy continued to be an adventurous voice in the rock space that she had begun occupying. 2024 proved to be a very busy year for Poppy. From featuring on two successful songs with Bad Omen and Knocked Loose—which was Grammy-nominated—, to going on tour with the likes of Avenged Sevenfold and 30 Seconds to Mars, Poppy was on a meteoric rise among metal fans. 

Now, in November of 2024, Poppy releases her highly anticipated new album, Negative Spaces. With Jordan Fisher (of former Bring Me The Horizon fame) and Stephen Harrison at the helm with her, this album was shaping out to be one for the metalheads. I was personally all on board when I heard the two lead singles new way out and they’re all around us. While not my favourite off the track list, I think new way out served as the perfect lead single to let listeners understand what this new album was going to be offering us. A metalcore sound with little to no semblance of Poppy’s usual genre mashing. Lyrically, however, the song’s narrative wouldn’t truly be felt until listened to within the context of the album. Meanwhile, they’re all around us made sure we understood exactly what kind of metal we should be expecting from this album. Coming right out the gate with an ear-crushing scream, this track served to set us up for Poppy going all-in on metal music. Screaming in a way we’ve never heard from her before while sporting a chorus that is catchy as all hell, I came away from this album with this as one of my favourites.

Going over the rest of the tracklist, you’ll find that Poppy isn’t trying to give us an album that musically ambitious and experimental, which are what people have come to expect from her. Especially if your main or only exposure to her was I Disagree, you’ll simultaneously be happy that she’s tripling down on the metal genre and disappointed that it has become pretty generic as a result. Now don’t get me wrong, that is in no way an indication of the quality of the music. As you can tell from the score and from the rest of this review in just a sec, I think the quality is definitely there. However, there is this sense of settling, kind of. Sure, there is a couple of non-metal tracks on the album, which I think fit perfectly where they are placed. There’s crystallized, a catchy and hypnotic piece of 80s synth pop about perseverance and finding the strength within yourself to survive life’s trials, sitting at the early-to-middle section of the album. It is one of my favourites off the tracklist. Halo closes the album out on a slower, more mellow note with very strong sentimental lyrics about love and not listening to other people’s opinions on your relationship with someone, since they aren’t the ones in the relationship and won’t understand the connection you have with someone you love and care for so deeply. I honestly love that the album closes on this very heartfelt and emotional track, and it is definitely in my top 3. 

Elsewhere on the album, Poppy delivers—to a very high degree of success—on her promise of a metalcore album. From the opening track, have you had enough?, which I think is pretty good and goes pretty damn hard. You get a good sense of what this album is about to give you from front to back. This song and the album at large seems to carry an aggression that is very focused at a single point, or a single “someone” I might say. Now I’m not saying I know who she’s singing about or if the lyrics are even actually about one specific person, but it does immerse me in the emotions Poppy is trying to convey. On this album, I think more than any previous effort, Poppy’s writing is the biggest strength of this album. She manages to craft a narrative about betrayal and self-introspection with lyrics that feel very multilayered, giving the complicated themes and emotions she’s singing about the necessary weight and complexity they require. The next track, the cost of giving up, is another strong banger with yet another catchy chorus and lyrics that perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to be your own worst enemy and contemplating “what’s the cost of giving up?” when it gets too heavy dealing with your own inner demons. 

Push go is another one where Poppy is very uplifting in her message to the masses. Emphasizing the importance of “protecting your own heart”, Poppy uses the catchy and rousing chorus of this frankly very pop-sounding song to essentially tell anyone who’s listening to get up, get off your ass, and “One step, push go, start to believe…push go, no hesitating,”. Push go is one of the few tracks where the metalcore sound slows down a bit to let Poppy bring out her ancient pop side. However, the sonic effect of this one song is almost immediately turned on its head as we move into nothing which is one of several tracks on here that carries a 2000s-era emo rock and nu metal sound to it. This one’s tough and Poppy goes off like a demon queen, especially on the bridge. In the very next song, the center’s falling out, Poppy goes fucking five steps further and gives us an absolutely psychotic and unhinged scream-queen performance. It goes absolutely fucking bonkers, I nearly had a heart attack. This song more than any other, I feel, really shows her credentials as a metal artist. I’m not going to talk about each track here because as good as they are, they truly work so well as a cog in this big machine that is this album. Each song serves the album so perfectly that talking about them individually doesn’t really capture why they work so well in the context of the album as a whole. However, I do want to point out surviving on defiance before I move on. A very melodic and melancholic cut, I think this is the strongest lyrical showing on the album. Poppy sings about putting about putting up walls as an act of self-preservation, while still hoping for a brighter future someday. It is a beautiful track that puts me right in my emotional gutter. 

Across the album, Poppy makes an excellent case for her talents not just as a metal vocalist—of which she excels at, by the way. Her singing and screaming is absolutely divine—and her good production tastes, but as a writer as well. Instead of the meta lyrics of I Disagree, Negative Spaces presents a tapestry in which many of the emotional complexities and introspective themes of self-doubt, self-love and care, are painted beautifully and vividly with words. It’s Poppy’s songwriting that earns my highest praise. While I can’t say for certain how personal these lyrics are for Moriah herself, I can say that I felt very engaged with the emotions that she is portraying. I felt them deeply, maybe because I understood them and could empathize. However, my criticism that the music has lost the unique touch and experimental genre-blending that Poppy typically brings still stands. Don’t get me wrong, Jordan Fish has crafted an immaculately produced album with some slight variation across the tracklist. It’s a very good metalcore album, albeit very typical. Remove Poppy’s voice from this project, and it would be lost in a sea of similar-sounding music. While the songs boast very catchy choruses, they are far from being pop song. Outside of crystallized and maybe halo, there’s very little pop elements or any other elements from other genres being implemented. I commend the focus, but I do miss the uniqueness and adventurousness she always brought to an album. 

It’s still a strong album regardless, though. I initially gave this a 7/10 but upon reading the lyrics and getting deeper into the album narrative, I decided it was good enough to elevate it to the current score.

Weak 8/10.