If you were on Youtube circa 2015, you might remember a viral video of a bleach-blonde girl staring blankly into a camera and repeating “I’m Poppy” for 2 minutes. This is Poppy, the brainchild of avant-garde director and music producer Titanic Sinclair and the actress who plays Poppy, Moriah Pereira. Poppy as a project has only gotten weirder since that fateful first upload, until she made the transition to writing music back in 2017. She’s released two albums since then, but on this new album, I Disagree, she’s chosen to go in a new direction: this is a pop-metal album.
Going into this album, I was skeptical of this genre combination. To me, they seemed like polar opposites, and wouldn’t come together very well. While some of these songs certainly prove that idea, the surprising majority of the tracks come together very well. The heavy metal parts are consistently loud and crushing, with exhilarating guitar riffs and thumping drums, and the pop parts generally take on a more mellow, synth-driven sound. Both the title track and “Bloodmoney” are highlights for the more metal-oriented tracks on the album, with “Bloodmoney” also throwing in a bit of industrial music to give it some added distortion. The track has a powerful chorus as well, with Poppy instructing listeners to “beg for forgiveness from Jesus the Christ” for their sins. The song “Fill the Crown” perhaps has the catchiest fusion of pop and metal on the entire album, and features growling male vocals on the chorus, an interesting support for Poppy’s lighter voice. I also think the closing track, “Don’t Go Outside”, is a successful combination of pop and metal as well, and serves as a light-hearted outro for such a dark, moody album.
Where I think the album suffers a bit is the more pop-oriented parts. I found some of the slower, pop-oriented tracks, like “Nothing I Need” and “Sick of the Sun”, to be a welcome change of pace from the rest of the album, even if I only think the former is particularly memorable, with its moody lead vocals and soothing chorus. The opening track, “Concrete”, has a good metal section but an annoying pop section, and rapidly switches between the two, making a confusing listen. And while I enjoy the backing track overall for “Bite Your Teeth”, the repetitive lyrics leave something to be desired.
Even though the pop-metal fusion on I Disagree doesn’t always work out, the album still is an interesting experiment, and has plenty of roaring metal bangers to make up for some of its shortcomings. I’m excited to see how Poppy grows this sound.
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