On her sixth album, the YouTuber-turned pop acrobat Poppy has launched herself into alt-metal. The result is largely impressive, pulling together hard-edged metalcore with tuneful asides and occasional balladry.
There are some truly memorable tracks here. They’re All Around Us is a three and a half minute epic, opening with a frenetic double kick doom section, Poppy scream-squawking over the top. After a while it breaks into a sweet, teenage melody: “When your spirit's black and blue / And your heroes all desert you / Will you curse what's coming true?”
It’s blistering, machine-gun musicianship that would effectively soundtrack an anime sequence where a hero with spiky hair does battle with a demon.
New Way Out is another banger, arriving with Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial riffage. Indeed, Trent Reznor’s influence is everywhere on this record, and when the song then slows to a half time for a sustained emo chorus with lyrics about people dragging Poppy down, you feel in a pretty familiar space, despite this being Poppy’s first meaningful foray into this sound.
It’s powerful, resonant stuff that it will likely hold its own when placed on bills at metal festivals with bands who have been playing this kind of music for their whole existence. Part of that is down to her collaborators — the former Bring Me The Horizon member Jordan Fish and House of Protection’s Stephen Harrison — but when you zoom out Poppy’s slick assimilation into this style might be a problem.
In her short career, Poppy has vaulted around generically, from playing an uncanny-valley style android on social media, to ska pop, art-pop, electro and now this. The biggest band in the emo-industrial metal complex are probably Linkin Park, and they are seeing a bit of a resurgence with Emily Armstrong on vocals. It’s likely that fans of that sound will gravitate towards ‘Negative Spaces’. But for how long?
Genre-hopping as a musical artist is always a bit of a risk. Madonna and David Bowie did it to a similar extent, and Beyoncé is making a mid-career surge into country, but all those artists’ music is fundamentally better. When you don’t quite pull off the musical zigs in terms of the quality, what should be seen as versatility can actually come across as a little craven and unmoored, losing fans with every left turn. Does ‘Negative Spaces’ establish a whole new platform for Poppy? Only time will tell. But as a standalone album it just about lands the double somersault.
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