Poppy gets more consistent—but no less interesting—on Negative Spaces

“When you zig, I zag,” Poppy once sang—a manifesto of sorts for a mercurial heavy-pop provocateur. And indeed, an essential part of Poppy fandom has always been The Chase: You’d follow her trail into an industrial-metal verse, and then she’d pull a 180 for a symphonic Pet Sounds chorus and pivot for a vintage alt-rock bridge. Remember by the end of Caddyshack, when Bill Murray’s character has annihilated the golf course in pursuit of that dancing gopher? That’s what you feel like after one of her albums—but in a good way.

Surreal shapeshifting has always made sense for Poppy, given that she entered the public eye making post-modern YouTube performance art based on an android-like character. But the more we’ve gotten to know Poppy’s songwriting, and the more humanity we’ve glimpsed, the more she’s zeroed in on her strengths. If you’ll indulge another ridiculous Caddyshack reference: You can keep chasing the elusive gopher, but you don’t want to detonate so many explosives that you blow up the entire golf course… or something. (Translation: It’s enough to just make a good, consistent album without worrying about zigging or zagging.) 

All of which is to say that the heavier and hookier Negative Spaces, Poppy’s sixth LP, is probably her most satisfying group of songs, rather than holy-shit-this-is-cool experiments. That said, this is still a Poppy album—very few artists can credibly conjure Madonna and Nine Inch Nails in the span of 42 minutes. The difference is how cohesive she makes it all feel, working with producer and co-writer Jordan Fish (former keyboardist of metalcore act Bring Me The Horizon). 

The dominant vibe is late-’90s to mid-2000s alt-rock, running the gamut from Evanescence (“the cost of giving up,” with its crackling synth pulses and nu-metal) to Paramore (“vital,” with its stadium-sized and surprisingly sweet pop-punk chorus) to Garbage (“push go,” with its detuned distortion and a clipped vocal melody that sounds designed for the end cred—its of a big-budget Hollywood action film circa 1998, back when people bought soundtracks). 

As usual, Poppy can effortlessly move between cutesy coo and bloodcurdling scream, often contrasting the two within the same song (opener “have you had enough?”)—but the album’s transcendent moments are rarely in the harsh-metal realm at all. “negative spaces” is the spawn of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” (the verse and vocal cadence) and AFI’s eternal “Girl’s Not Grey” (the bass tone, the “whoa-oh” backing vocals), and “surviving on defiance” is like Deftones in pure atmosphere mood, from the hip-hop swagger of the drums to the Chino Moreno twinkle of the vocal to the swallow-the-earth attack of the chorus guitars. 

But none of these nods feel like recycling—they’re like names on tubes of paint, squeezed into color combos that feel all her own. Poppy will probably (hopefully) never stop zigging or zagging. But she’s just as compelling when those twists and turns are a touch more subtle.