A decade into her career, Poppy is still an enigma. Her journey over that time has been one of reinvention. She’s a chameleon who transformed herself from a surreal YouTube sensation with a robotic persona to an experimental pop star, to her current status as one of the most in-demand new artists in metal. Every step in that evolution has been more unexpected than the last, and every step has made it harder to pin down exactly who Poppy is… which is exactly how she likes it.
Case in point: the singer’s first ever Metal Hammer cover shoot. Taking place at a nondescript New York studio, she has an array of outfits to try on. Tellingly, every photo, so disparate in look and feel, could be of a completely different artist. Shifting between tone and texture, she cycles between aesthetics; hyper-femme in soft luxurious suede, fashion icon in overly structured leather with heel-less shoes that look viciously uncomfortable, and, in the spirit of Halloween and October, when this issue is on sale, an homage to Edward Scissorhands.
She’s about to release her sixth album, Negative Spaces. A few weeks later, we ask her what inspired the sound, which swings between the “saccharine” and the “heaviest” songs she’s ever done – all given a glossy finish by ex-Bring Me The Horizon keyboardist/producer Jordan Fish.
“I get bored rather quickly so I have to cater to my own attention span,” she replies. Speaking in a soft, Southern accent over a Zoom call with the camera off, she’s enjoying a rare day off in Austin, while on tour with 30 Seconds To Mars and AFI. Her manner is friendly but undeniably guarded. It’s a balance that has made Poppy an intriguing proposition in today’s hyper-accessible world, yet Poppy knows exactly who she is.
“I’m not very agreeable, but I’m open to being wrong and challenged. But I also know in my being when something feels right. And I think that’s always been the thing that pushed me forward on all aspects of my life.”
How long has she been like that? “Since birth, probably,” she replies. “I feel like I came out running and swinging.”
The metal scene isn’t wanting for colourful characters, but even so, Poppy – born Moriah Rose Pereira – feels like a lightning bolt. She first announced herself to an audience of millions in 2014, when she began posting videos to YouTube that felt like a Black Mirror-meets-David Lynch ASMR nightmare. Against sterile pastels she adopted a robotic persona, speaking to plants and mannequins in a child-like monotone. It often felt vacuous and random – one video of her wordlessly eating cotton candy has clocked up 4.6 million views – although rippling underneath was barbed commentary on social media culture that became darker over time.
Her music career has been a series of hairpin stylistic turns that has seen her dabble with synthetic fembot pop (2018’s Am I A Girl?), 90s garage rock (2021’s Flux), and throbbing dancefloor beats on last year’s Zig.
“I think music is just how I communicate with myself and how I’m able to work it out in real-time,” she considers.
Much like the internet culture she’s endlessly parodied, as soon as you think you’ve got her nailed down, she moves onto the next thing, never making the same art twice.
“Zig was just a vessel for me to dance,” she explains. “I made the music videos I wanted to make and when those videos were wrapped, I [wipes hands] was done and I couldn’t wait to get back in the studio.”
Poppy first appeared on metal’s periphery with Play Destroy, a 2018 collaboration with electronic producer Grimes, which added serious teeth to her cutesy melodies. Then there was the following year’s Choke EP, including the song Scary Mask with Fever 333. She followed up by signing to metal label Sumerian and releasing 2020 album I Disagree, a chaotic clash of hyperpop and serrated riffs that further explored the sound and iconography of heavy music. The cover art showed her wearing corpsepaint and a spiked dog collar.
Meanwhile, the industrial-tinged track BLOODMONEY earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 2021; she was the first ever female solo artist nominated in the category.
“The feeling that I wanted to create at my shows lent itself more towards guitar music,” she says. “Witnessing [metal] live and performing myself: it’s thrilling.”
Sonically, I Disagree reflected the turbulence of her life at the time. In 2018, she and her then-creative partner, Titanic Sinclair (real name Corey Mixter) were sued by a fellow YouTuber, Mars Argo (real name Brittany Sheets), who accused the pair of copying her identity in Poppy’s viral YouTube videos – something they denied. According to the NME, the suit was settled in 2019, although Poppy and Titanic would acrimoniously part ways that year too, with Poppy accusing Titanic of manipulating behaviour. "I was trapped in a mess I needed to dig my way out of,” she wrote in a social media statement at the time. “And like I always do, I figured out how to handle it.”
She’s reluctant to dredge up any of the Titanic history today. “I don’t think that person deserves any airtime,” she says simply. “But I think as a project, I’m proud of what [the YouTube videos] ended up being and doing, and the recognition the project got.”
I Disagree put her on the radar of luminaries Deftones, who invited her to support them on their 2020 tour, alongside Gojira, although Covid meant it never ended up happening. “That was one of the larger letdowns of that period of life,” she sighs.
The shift to a heavier sound caused a stir with her fanbase at the time, but for Poppy, it felt like a “natural incorporation”. Her older siblings had introduced her to heavy music, namely Nine Inch Nails and Kittie, when she was eight or nine. While the industrial-electro influence of the former is littered throughout her more recent work, particularly on Dead Flowers, her 2021 collab with noisemakers Health, it was Kittie that really spoke to her, one of her first examples of women carving their own path in a male-dominated world.
“There was a lot of power in what they had to say, and I felt that even before I could really relate to the stories they were telling,” she explains.
Last year, she covered Kittie’s nu metal anthem, Spit. It was a full-circle moment. “They reposted the cover and were very complimentary and kind,” she remembers. “Their story and how they came to be is really inspiring to me as a female artist. I think it’s really great that they’re still making music.”
It’s been a run of 2024 collaborations that has put Poppy firmly at the forefront of modern metal. In January, she teamed up with Bad Omens for the track V.A.N, her angelic vocal contrasting with dark, pulsing electronics. A few months later, she joined Knocked Loose on one of the best tracks of 2024, Suffocate. Not only did Poppy’s presence elevate the music – her demonic scream, along with the song’s reggaeton breakdown, is the song’s most memorable moment – it pushed Knocked Loose to raise their game too.
“I was like, if we’re going to have her on a song, it has to be one of the heaviest songs on the record… it’s got to be insane,” Knocked Loose vocalist Bryan Garris said in an interview with Nik Nocturnal in April. “Her music is all over the place, so we were like, ‘Let’s do some stuff we wouldn’t normally do.’”
“I had messaged Bryan mentioning I’m a big fan and that I think our voices would sound really great together,” Poppy remembers, palpably excited. “When Bryan first sent me the song it was just music, no vocals, and it was thrilling even at that point.”
Now Poppy is preparing to release Negative Spaces. It’s a title, we surmise, that could mean many things: the album’s striking cover art shows Poppy naked, melting into white liquid or marble.
“I like the idea that negative is just as important as occupied space,” she says. “At points I regard the negative space as more of a physical area or place I don’t want to return to. At other points, I feel the weight of negativity in my mind.”
Characteristically, she gets more abstract. “I like to walk on the edges and cracks. The light seems more vivid when you come out of the depths of the dark. I think about that often. Grey areas leave a lot of questions, so I like extremes.”
Sonically, Negative Spaces exists at the opposite ends of the spectrum, and as with all Poppy’s records, it covers new ground. The tracklist is still a clash of metal and bubblegum, but whereas past albums took on disparate influences within a single song, here she’s gone all-in, creating tracks that are completely metal and pushing her voice to the limit.
While the futuristic Crystallized and Vital throw back to the glistening hyperpop of her previous work, parts of Negative Spaces are fantastically heavy. There’s The Center’s Falling Out, which opens with skittering drums reminiscent of Slipknot’s Eyeless. The Cost Of Giving Up ends in a maelstrom of screams and brutal death growls.
“I wanted to make a record with the show in mind. I wanted to sing, and I wanted to experiment vocally [in a way] that I haven’t put on a recording yet,” she says. Single They’re All Around Us, released as this magazine went to press, is easily the heaviest track she’s put her name to so far. It opens in a hail of drums, Poppy shrieking her face off amid chunky guitars – ‘Stab me in the back… You know you can’t trust no one…’ – topped by a shimmering Bring Me The Horizon-esque chorus. It sounds like a purge.
“I was speaking to people that you thought you could count on letting you down,” she explains. “Betrayal, if you will.”
Tonally and sonically, she cites influences as varied as Hole singer Courtney Love, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, French film Amélie and UK 90s alt grunge band Garbage. It’s a vibrant, multifaceted sound that recalls both Bring Me The Horizon’s 2015 album That’s The Spirit and 2019’s Amo – perhaps unsurprising, given ex-BMTH keyboardist/producer Jordan Fish, the man who helped create the modern, genre-mashing incarnation of the band’s sound, has got his fingerprints all over it.
A longtime friend of Poppy (she toured with BMTH in 2019), the pair wrote and recorded the whole album together between the UK and LA. It’s Jordan’s first full project since leaving his band last year.
“Jordan is wildly talented, and I am so lucky to call him a friend,” Poppy says. “Where he swings from creatively is exciting to me. His influences are very broad and, when we talk about music, I feel like we speak a similar language.”
The first song they recorded together was the Linkin Park esque electro-rock meets nu metal lead single, New Way Out, complete with a Disturbed Down With The Sickness-esque bark.
“I don’t like nu metal,” she replies, when we wonder if the recent nu metal revival has been one of the inspirations behind the album’s heavier approach. “I like elements that I suppose are used in that subgenre. But I think when I use them it is coincidental. I have never sat in the studio and thought, ‘I will now make a nu metal song.’”
When we initially asked Poppy’s label about the narrative behind Negative Spaces, we were told the album represented Poppy finally dropping the robotic persona of her YouTube days to embrace a more authentic representation of herself. When we relay this to her, she dismisses it outright as “label jargon”, but there’s undoubtedly some truth in the idea. After all, there was a time when if journalists would ask where Poppy grew up, she would simply reply “the internet”.
In her earliest press interviews, Poppy would stay resolutely in character, a robot programmed only to answer particular questions, instead letting Titanic lead interviews with curious and sceptical journalists. Meanwhile, on the few occasions she gave TV interviews, she would run rings around bewildered TV hosts. (One example: Interviewer: “Your voice is really interesting, is that a special voice that you do for your on-camera appearances?” Poppy: “No, is yours a special voice?”).
Although she’s broken character in interviews since, she’s managed to achieve and maintain something genuinely rare for a celebrity today – a sense of mystique. Poppy has held her audience at arm’s length, only letting us know what she wants us to know about her personal life.
What we do know is this: Poppy was born in Boston in 1995 and was raised in Nashville. She eventually saved up enough money to move, and headed to Los Angeles on her own in 2013 at the age of 18. “I was never looking for fame; I was looking for a way to not work a normal job and to tour the world. That was my goal,” she explains.
How does she feel about sharing personal information these days? “I think there’s a lot of misinformation online, and there’s certain things that I care about correcting, but a lot of it I don’t,” she replies.
Can she describe her authentic self today? “I don’t think there’s a way to truly be authentic in the world anymore because of the way things get broadcasted online. There’ll always be a version that you put on the internet and a version that people know you to be behind closed doors. So I would just say that I’m Poppy,” she finishes, consciously or unconsciously referencing the title of her 2017 single and 2018 comedy series.
What’s the most interesting incorrect thing that you’ve read about yourself? “That my father owned YouTube.”
In many ways, Poppy has existed solely through the internet. A “textbook introvert” at school, she was bullied for being too quiet and too skinny, so she retreated to her bedroom where she found solace online. She would eventually homeschool herself using the ’net until she was 16. Over the years, though, her fascination has given way to wariness. The internet is no longer the safe space it once was.
“When I first started interacting with the internet, it was such a Wild West, and it was something that I wanted to understand further,” she says. “Now, I think we’re seeing a lot of the fallout from the over-exposure and the access to so much information on a mental health side. It’s just never allowing your brain to recentre, and it’s making for a lot of neuroses. We’re, as beings, not really supposed to know more than 10 to 15 people in a village. So access to all this information, it’s overwhelming.
“It’s probably better to just go to the library and open a book and read about something you actually want to know, as opposed to looking for something online that you want to read about. I think we need to go back to having interests and having an obsessive desire to learn about them on a deeper level, as opposed to just a surface level. But I’m talking about real interests and not just interests in other people’s lives.”
As a chronically ‘online’ artist, she now understands the need for balance between using the internet for promotion and protecting herself from online negativity. “I consider myself pretty sensitive,” she says.
“With a lot of information, circling back to what we’re saying about the internet and even anything that’s seen on the news, I can be really affected by my surroundings. So I have to be careful, I’ve learned that about myself. I’d rather keep it simple because sometimes the feelings are too much to carry. The internet is responsible for a lot of my career and things that I’ve been able to do and had access to, but it’s also something that you have to keep on a tighter leash and know what you’re doing when you interact with it, because it can pull you in by the neck and not let you go.”
Over time, she’s retrained her brain to shut out the noise. On tour she visits bookshops, gravitating towards certain books based on cover art and vibe. “The last book that I bought was Pure Colour [by Sheila Heti],” she says. “It’s pretty existential at times, but I find myself thinking about it, even when I put the book down. I can sense myself and my feelings being heightened as I’m reading it, but then coming to more of a peaceful resolve.”
These days, she avoids comments sections like the plague. “Those aren’t worth paying attention to; it muddies your creative path. Anybody that’s on a platform and has eyeballs looking at them, they’re going to receive criticism. It’s better to turn a blind eye. They’re not going to sway me one way or another. I’ve been doing this too long to let somebody like that think that they can discourage me from doing what I know I’m good at. You realise how little those stranger’s words actually mean, and it just muddies your view. So, if you can just get out the squeegee and clear it off your windshield, you’re better off.”
Poppy’s breakthrough into the wider metal consciousness couldn’t have come at a better time. Metal feels the most diverse and exciting that it has done in years, and with new artists such as Scene Queen, Wargasm, Spiritbox and Loathe blurring the boundaries, there are fewer rules than ever. It’s an environment Poppy thrives in.
“I think there’s always going to be resistance from other sides when a big movement happens, but somebody has to be there to do it first and push all those people out of the way,” she says. “The ones that are like the ‘squeaky wheels’.”
That said, don’t expect her to release something as one-dimensional as a metalcore album anytime soon… “I think it’s funny when people throw around the term ‘metalhead’. I think anybody that outwardly identifies as a metalhead is a nerd,” she laughs. “‘Being a fan of metal music’ is a better way to say ‘a metalhead’, as if there’s some weird cult. It’s dorky.”
We wonder if the ‘dorkiness’ of the term is the problem, or rather it’s the idea of putting herself in a box in general. “Maybe a little bit of both. But that’s where I’ve always had dissonance with whatever that scene is. There are people that come on really strong with being a gatekeeper, another term that gets thrown around in the genre. I think it’s really silly and it’s really dated.”
Instead, she insists she’s happier being an outsider, branding her music “post-genre”. “I’m just a lover of music.”
As for the future, Poppy reveals she’s got two big ventures in the works – a short film and a “visual project”. As our chat comes to an end, we ask her what she thinks Negative Spaces says about who Poppy is in 2024, although we quickly realise the futility of the question. All albums are a timestamp of where an artist is in their life, but by the time this feature is printed, Poppy will have moved onto the next thing, likely a brand new universe, always two steps ahead. To where and what… she’ll know when she gets there.
“There’s a feeling that I get in my chest that’s like, ‘This could all fall apart at any moment or it could go well.’ It’s like when you’re balancing on the edge of a sidewalk or I’m balancing on the edge of a high building. It’s like, this could be cool or this could be terrible. Either way, I’ll remember it.”
Negative Spaces is out Nov 15 via Sumerian. Poppy will support Babymetal on tour in Europe next Spring and play Download Festival in June.
