Since launching a decade ago as a childlike, robotic YouTube character and meme, Los Angeles-based Moriah Pereira, AKA Poppy, has parted from original co-creator Titanic Sinclair and devoted more of her energies to pop, amassing millions of streams for forays into everything from bubblegum to nu-metal. The subtext of her sixth album is a struggle for identity. “Maybe I’m the one I’m running from,” she sings on the hard-but-gentle The Cost of Giving Up, while the self-explanatory Surviving on Defiance is beautifully raw. Over 15 tracks, she emerges as someone determined to trust her own instincts.
After this year’s successful collaborations with Knocked Loose and Bad Omens, this sixth album leans into metalcore. Producer Jordan Fish (formerly of Bring Me the Horizon) brings industrial machine polish to heavy guitars, blood-curdling screaming and contrarily sweet, honeyed choruses. However, Poppy’s widening sonic palette stretches from electro-goth to the excellent Crystallised, a ready-made EDM-meets-Eurodance anthem.
Negative Spaces – her screamiest yet sweetest track – nods to Celebrity Skin-era Hole, but Hey There is, of all things, loungecore with unlikely shades of Barry White. Riff-crunching pop-metal and retro futurist synthpop abound, but the album’s best moments are the most adventurous: the minimalist, electronic, childlike Tomorrow (“dreaming my life away, tomorrow I’ll change”) or classy Halo, a melancholy banger. Poppy has built her impressive “Poppy seeds” fanbase with disparate followers of every genre, but this might be the moment that unites them all.
