Style: Pop Metalcore, Alternative Metal, Industrial (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Spiritbox, Conquer Divide, Evanescence, Babymetal, Grimes
Country: United States
Release date: 23 January 2026

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It’s easy to be cynical. To write and produce music takes a gargantuan amount of energy, physical and emotional. The courage it takes to put your most intimate feelings and your most private life experiences into words and melodies—and not just to do that, but to record it and put it on the Internet for the world to see—is astounding.¹ It’s why perceived inauthenticity elicits such a visceral emotional reaction from fans; whether “selling out” or using ghost writers or AI, to be “inauthentic” immediately invalidates your art. As humans, we connect with each other on an emotional level through music. For one side to pull the rug out from under the other is an unforgivable sin.

If the average progressive metal fan has heard of Poppy at all, they likely know her from her 2019 breakthrough hit² “Concrete“, characterized by its abrupt pivots between industrial metal verses and clean, saccharine pop choruses.³ Browsing through her back catalog would reveal that Poppy had not always been a genre-stitching Dr. Frankenstein, but found her footing in the music industry with plain vanillapop music (hence the name). Prior to that, she had a YouTube channel full of oddly unnerving, confusingly juvenile videos that seemed to serve only as absurd advertisements for her music. From her pop roots, her output has grown more experimental, incorporating elements of metal and industrial music. Gatekeeping metal fans would question her sincerity: is Poppy an artist who has genuinely done a bit of genre hopping and finally found her niche? Or is she an opportunist who has settled on metal because that’s now her “brand”? Perhaps her latest album, Empty Hands, can shed some light on the situation.

Poppy has yet to become an artist who revels in the structural fundamentals of progressive metal. Her songs have never—and still don’t, as of Empty Hands—fully embrace genre tropes like unusual and shifting time signatures or extended length of composition. But from Poppy.Computer to I Disagree and beyond, she has slowly excised the major-key, harmonized-vocals bubblegum pop that used to be her core sound, replacing it with Spiritbox-style melody-driven metalcore, hammering drums, tectonic guitar, and—most evidently on Empty Hands—harsh vocals. Unlike many metal artists, who come to the genre to create brütal rïffage and then have to figure out how to make their music palatable to a wide audience, Poppy‘s pop music pedigree means that her tracks come pre-digested: a bevy of hooks, pop song structure, and memorable choruses with soaring vocal melodies abound. The metal “street cred” is what seems to need safety-pinning on after the fact.

While Am I A Girl? and I Disagree saw Poppy dipping her toes into the genre, Empty Hands dives in head first. There is not a single track on the album which could be confused for something from her back catalog. “Public Domain” opens the album in a Marilyn Manson-esque pop-industrial context (see: “The Beautiful People”), and “Empty Hands” ends it on an absolutely brutal deathcore note. In between those two bookends, the album alternates between cleaner, more radio-friendly tracks à la Evanescence (“Unravel”) and harsher, more technical ones (“Dying to Forget”). “Dying to Forget” in particular showcases Poppy‘s seriously impressive vocal acrobatics, jumping from viciously flaying harsh verses to crystal clear clean choruses. Vocal technique aside, Poppy‘s lyricism has also improved in leaps and bounds since the Poppy.Computer days. Consider

“You never make me any food
And you are never in the mood
So come on, baby, tell me, are you gay?”

– “Software Upgrade” from Poppy.Computer (2017)

“Isn’t it peculiar how the chatter fails to offer
Any solace in the light of the truth?”

– “Public Domain” from Empty Hands (2026)

Although many of us wish we could permanently scrub our cringiest moments from social media, the Internet never forgets. That goes double for artists, where the content is what pays the bills. To atone for the sins of her early, embarrassing foray into the music industry, Poppy is doing her damndest to put out thoughtful, well-crafted art. Is it working?

Tracks like “Empty Hands” would argue “yes”. If you do whatever the aural equivalent of squinting is, you might mistake it for a shorter piece by previous label bandmates Between the Buried and Me. The thundering double-bass pedal drumming and chunky, djenty guitars show a willingness to play to expectations for fans of metalcore and death metal. Poppy‘s vocals shift from shrill, almost-uncontrolled screaming, to a squeaky-clean alto, to lower-register growls that are on the cusp of pig squeals. There’s a seriously impressive range of vocal timbre there, but the lack of instrumental showmanship is notable. The band is, after all, just a backdrop for the vocals—it’s Poppy, not Poppy and Friends.

Like a wood-framed house infested with termites, Empty Hands is lacking structural integrity. In pop music, the spotlight is always on the vocalist; the band onstage are only there to provide a veneer of authenticity. This is the fundamental difference between Poppy and female-fronted metalcore bands like Spiritbox and Calva Louise: Poppy may have honed her vocal and lyrical skills, but the lack of credited and consistent musicianship will forever haunt her, as long as she works under the umbrella of metal music, where authenticity is paramount.⁴ And “Unravel” highlights this: while other tracks feature a drums-and-guitar palette, “Unravel” is largely synths and piano, with drums and guitar only coming in for emphasis at emotional crescendos. It’s such a dramatic textural difference from the rest of the album that it almost feels like a different artist. At least Empty Hands has credited studio musicians, Poppy‘s previous release, Negative Spaces, has at least five different producers and engineers credited, but not a single instrumentalist. Poppy is a fantastic vocalist, but metal audiences demand more than vocals.

Empty Hands is Poppy‘s strongest release to date. It showcases her vocal range and provides a venue for her most thoughtful and mature lyrics yet. But metal fans are a demanding bunch. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, we’re going to run a battery of tests and assessments to ensure that it actually is a duck, and not actually a frog in a duck costume. Poppy has definitively shown that she has an artistic range which encompasses and surpasses the boundaries of pop music, and she has taken a bite out of metal, as well. There should be no doubt that she has grown as an artist and pushed herself to tackle new challenges. But the lack of dedication to consistent musicianship on her records that puts Poppy in the spotlight by herself eschews the collectivist mentality that is foundational to much of metal. We’re all in this together, except for Poppy, who is doing her own thing. Until that changes, all of her future albums will retain that “pop” adjective ahead of “metal”.

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Recommended tracks: Empty Hands, Dying To Forget, Bruised Sky, Eat The Hate
You may also like: Cassyette, Scene Queen, Dorian Electra, Calva Louise, Ithaca
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Sumerian Records

Poppy is:
– Moriah Rose Pereira (vocals, guitar, composition)

With studio performances by
– Ralph Alexander (drums)
– Jordan Fish (guitar, keyboards, production)
– Johnuel Hasney (bass guitar, guitar)

1. I sure as shit couldn’t do it. That’s why I’m a critic. ↩︎
2. …and first Sumerian Records release ↩︎
3. …and its asinine lyrics: “bury me six feet deep / cover me in concrete / turn me into a street” ↩︎
4. Note that Poppy has had instrumental performances herself on past releases, but Empty Hands has nearly a completely different cast of credited instrumentalists compared to Negative Spaces, and Zig has a host of instrumentalists all credited as just “additional instrumentation”, as far as this author can tell. ↩︎