To the average modern metal listener with playlists scant of female vocalists, Poppy’s new album is a contrived but fun metalcore jukebox record. To the average Poppy fan, “Negative Spaces” is Poppy’s most exciting, cohesive, and independent project yet. Both are true interpretations, so it has left me wondering if this is Poppy embracing her authentic style or if she’s just showing off her metalcore chops for the heck of it. Either way, it can’t be denied Poppy’s new album is an enjoyable listen and valiant attempt at metalcore, despite its numerous shortcomings.
Poppy is no stranger to the limelight. Many may recognize her from her odd, childlike android persona that went viral on YouTube several years ago. In 2017, she began releasing dance-pop music as this character in collaboration with Titanic Sinclair, the abusive co-founder of the Poppy project.
Since breaking off her toxic partnership with Sinclair in 2019, Poppy has progressively incorporated more metal into her sound while still holding on to the quirks of her android character. While she has experimented with a wide range of genres since then, this year’s wildly popular collaborations with Bad Omens and Knocked Loose have signaled a more intentional change of pace. Compared to her past projects, which felt more like temporary stints in metal, “Negative Spaces” marks Poppy’s full-fledged — even if somewhat unoriginal — entrance into the metalcore scene. With ex-Bring Me the Horizon producer Jordan Fish on board for this album, she has taken her songwriting in a more mainstream direction and effectively shed her YouTube identity.
The album begins with “have you had enough,” an undulating industrial metalcore track with an anthemic chorus and interludes for Poppy’s hard-hitting screams. The song sets a standard for the song structure Poppy closely follows throughout the record, making other tracks like “the cost of giving up,” “nothing,” and even her first single “new way out” sound formulaic and redundant in the scope of modern metal. Despite these tracks’ shallow lyricism, the Slipknot-esque riffs in “they’re all around us” pack a concussive punch, and “the center’s falling out” hits the sweet spot of hardcore and thall, Poppy’s angsty screams at the forefront of each hit.
Poppy flaunts a distinctly 90s influence in several songs, juxtaposing the feelings of flying on top of the world while being crushed by life’s problems. As someone who grew up with 90s rock and alternative in my veins, I felt at home listening to the feel-good vocal runs and hopeful pre-choruses of “vital.” “Push go” mashes Madonna and Rob Zombie together to create a bouncy, yet heavy, industrial track. I instantly gravitated toward the brooding ambience of “surviving on defiance.” After picking up on its influences of Deftones and, by extension, Sleep Token, I only liked it more. The album closes with a necessary slower, reflective track in “halo,” conforming to patterns in modern metal.
However, despite the exciting genre synthesis that Poppy achieves on this record, I have a serious bone to pick with multiple tracks. The shortcomings on this album are impossible to ignore; drawing inspiration from an artist is very different from directly copying their work, and I feel that Poppy crossed this line multiple times in the misleading name of paying homage to her inspirations.
The first instance of borderline plagiarism is in the first track of the record. I confess I did not catch the similarities in my first few listens, but it soon struck me that “have you had enough” almost exactly echoes the song structure, key, and vocal runs of “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails.
Additionally, the title track caught my attention immediately as a blatant ripoff — not a tribute — of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” with no indication of a sample, as of this article’s publishing. Rather than labeling these tracks as having vibes of a certain artist, this kind of work should be called out. It’s unfortunate that Poppy feels the need to copy other artists to make it big; this realization made me relisten to other tracks on the record expecting to find other close calls. The most interesting similarities I found were in the style of Grimes, a former collaborator and contemporary rival. The vocals on “push go” mimic Grimes’ signature ethereal production, and the drums on “new way out” are a near exact match to those on “We Appreciate Power,” notably the only industrial rock song Grimes has written.
Although this isn’t the most unique phase of her career, I do concede that Poppy is a total scream queen and I’m glad to witness her wholehearted embrace of metalcore. Based on her past musical trajectory, I have my doubts that Poppy will stay in this lane for long. She is known for switching genres entirely between albums based on present trends, setting very diverse expectations from her fans and muddling her musical identity over time. I hope that, in future projects, Poppy carves out a more individual niche for herself without stealing from artists that she admires.
