What did Poppy know? Just as reality started to become indistinguishable from AI brainrot and streamers began flooding the White House press pool, Poppy unplugged herself from the satirical cyborg character that made her a minor YouTube luminary in the 2010s and fulfilled her unlikely pivot to personhood. For Poppy, aka 31-year-old singer-screamer-pop-star Moriah Pereira, her transition from weird-internet denizen to two-time Grammy nominee has landed her in the increasingly popular—and increasingly unbearable—world of blockbuster metalcore, where she’s now one of the genre’s biggest and most talented stars.
Poppy’s metal breakthrough arrived with 2020’s I Disagree. That album’s madcap collision of Grimes-ian alt-pop, glitchy glam, wacked-out J-pop, and steel-toed nu-metal had the same eye-bulging whiplash effect as other “extremely online” landmarks like 1000 gecs and The Money Store. In the years since I Disagree, Poppy’s output has become far less net-damaged and slightly more conventional, flitting between riotous metalcore, No Doubt-ish alternative, and low-light synth-pop before returning to a hook-heavy form of metallurgic pop-rock on 2024’s Negative Spaces.
On that album, Poppy’s acrobatic voice, capable of lunging from fanged shrieks to majestic wails on a dime, found its match in producer Jordan Fish, the former Bring Me the Horizon member whose handiwork on BMTH albums like Sempiternal and That’s the Spirit remade metalcore in the image of high-gloss pop music, creating a new genre paradigm that Poppy’s now thriving in. Fish is back as co-writer and co-producer on Empty Hands, Poppy’s seventh full-length, and all the extremes of her sound are amplified: heavier breakdowns, savvier choruses, and quirkier collisions of synths and guitars. The results are often enervating though sometimes clumsy.
What distinguishes Poppy within a subgenre plagued by hambone spectacle is her agility in avoiding schmaltz. Poppy’s clean singing voice is actually pleasant, and she wields her arresting pipes with ice-melting force on Empty Hands singles “Unravel” and “Guardian.” The former applies the right amount of BRAT’s close-mic’d quivering to offset the downtuned guitar quakes, while the latter sounds a bit like Paramore if Hayley Williams was an evil Yu-Gi-Oh! character. Both are powerhouse singalongs that prove how satisfying metal-tinged pop can be when it’s delivered by capable cords.
Those melodic feats are made even more impressive by the fact that Empty Hands is Poppy’s heaviest, darkest record by a considerable margin: Casual fans who come to her music for motivating gym playlist fodder aren’t ready for the abrasive howls and concussive breakdowns of “Dying to Forget” and “Bruised Sky.” Her barbaric screams on Knocked Loose’s “Suffocate” in 2024 showed she had that dog in her, but even that song sounds chipper compared to Empty Hands’ closing title track, a deathcore rager featuring blastbeats, the style of extreme-metal squeals colloquially known as “brees,” and not one note of cleans.
What makes Poppy more than just a one-woman metalcore band is that she approaches this type of music with the mind of a big-budget pop star. Fish is essentially the Max Martin of this milieu, and he’s skilled at making metalcore sound ultra-modern without neutering the primal impact of chugging guitars. On Fish’s records, choruses explode, breakdowns shatter, and verses never feel like tossed-off transitions. He’s great at sneaking squiggly flourishes into straightforward metalcore strides, but he’s less skilled at building entire songs outside of the box.
For instance, the viscous synths and chattering drum breaks that elevate “Unravel” just pile atop the bleep-bloop clutter that asphyxiates “Ribs.” Relatedly, Empty Hands’ weakest track is opener “Public Domain,” an overcooked flashback to I Disagree’s industrial wonkiness that forgot to leave space for its winking charm. The synth-pop levity of “Time Will Tell” feels like an out-of-place nod to Lady Gaga, and its chintzy Eurotrance chorus reeks of a hopeful remix by some EDM cheeseball. Empty Hands is at its best when the maximalist arrangements sound big, not bloated, and despite a few clunkers, most of this record plays to those strengths. Poppy found her way into metal not by striding through the front door, but by hoisting the genre up like a child would a dollhouse and giving it a shake to see what fell out. Now, she’s no longer approaching metal as a curious onlooker but as an established star driving the genre’s zeitgeist.
