The tail end of Poppy’s 2018 effort Am I A Girl? began the YouTube creator’s foray into heavy music. Since then, she’s played around with nu metal, industrial, dubstep, and alternative rock, calling her work “post-genre” above all else. It would seem that she’s doing something right, having earned two Grammy nominations, a long-standing and recently revived partnership with WWE, and making lasting marks on the charts and streaming. For some, Poppy is a gateway drug for some who would otherwise not dabble in heavy music, for others she is a trailblazer and a revolutionary.
Her sixth album Negative Spaces is a distillation of her experimentation, and it works better than it perhaps should. Playing fast and loose with influences and crossing genre rubicons at will, Poppy continues to be one of the most exciting acts in music today, and her production partnership with former Bring Me the Horizon keyboardist Jordan Fish gives this record a vibrant, tight sound all around.
While Poppy’s work may challenge the listener’s concept of heavy music, she does have a couple of radio-ready bangers here in “The Cost of Giving Up” and “Vital,” offering a mainstream rock sound without losing the plot. “New Way Out” is just as anthemic, with a nod to a certain sickness by way of an “AWK AWK” in the breakdown. Poppy can play along exactly as long as she needs to, as evidenced by these more accessible songs.
Her recent work with Knocked Loose leaves its influence on songs like “They’re All Around Us” and “The Center’s Falling Out,” the former containing a blistering, kick-the-door-off-its-hinges intro full of machine gun kick drums and more chugging than a White Claw-fueled college party. In either case, her screams sound as clean and vicious as they ever have, and the breakdown in “The Center’s Falling Out” is sure to demolish the pits of her upcoming tour.
What brought Poppy to the dance was her synthpop-laden early albums in the middle of the last decade, and songs like “Push Go” and “Crystallized” give a nod to those halcyon days. The former is a pop song with rock window dressing, while the latter is pure post-punk. To that end, the title track gives some feelings of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin,” and given Poppy’s previous covers of late Nineties and early Aughts pop music, a tip of the hat to Courtney Love and Co. wouldn’t be so out of place.
Negative Spaces is an eclectic buffet wherein listeners are bound to find something to latch onto. If you go home hungry after this record’s conclusion, that’s your own damn fault, as Poppy has served up a diverse record that manages to do a lot of things well in spite of itself.
Negative Spaces is available now via Sumerian Records.
