Poppy takes a sharp turn

Poppy appears on the cover of the Fall 2023 Issue. Head to the AP Shop to grab a copy, as well as an exclusive vinyl variant of Zig, limited to 500 copies.

“I don’t like to tell people what I’m going to do before I do it,” Poppy tells Alternative Press. “I’ve always been that way, and that’s why I feel really disconnected from other creative people who talk about what they’re going to do beforehand. I would rather just do it, and people can decide [what they think about it] after, but while they’re deciding, I’ve already moved onto something else.”

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Poppy’s been a wholly unpredictable force since the moment she uploaded a surreal, captivatingly weird video of her wordlessly eating cotton candy in 2014. The proto-ASMR clip, which has been viewed over 4.6 million times to date, soft-launched the artist as a sort of living meme. Equal parts creepy and cute, Poppy’s bizarre vlogs took on a mythical quality over time, leaving some viewers wondering if the soft-spoken young woman on their screen was a real human being or a robot, nearly a decade before the complex conversation surrounding AI consumed our collective social media. 

But Poppy is neither android nor an alter ego. Instead, the Poppy you see on screen or onstage is an extreme version of herself; a cyber-age performance artist-turned-musician stretched as far as her imagination can reach. “I think the edges and lines bleed into each other. I am in this existence every day, so I know what it is and what it means to me. I also have this playground that I created, and I want to take full advantage of it while I’m here,” she explains. 

That sense of playfulness and unpredictability has been the only thing to truly define Poppy as a musician since she made her debut with the bouncy pop-rock track “Everybody Wants to be Poppy” in 2015. Since then, she’s released five studio albums (including her new album, Zig), dozens of singles, three soundtrack albums, six EPs, a handful of covers and collaborative features, and toured the world. 

Along the way, she’s experimented with countless styles of music, from bubblegum pop to shoegaze and new wave, never settling for any one genre but gaining legions of new fans with her 2020 heavy-metal breakout album, I Disagree. Poppy’s uninhibited journey into metal, complete with unapologetic lyrical proclamations like “Down, let it all burn down” and “Beg for forgiveness from Jesus the Christ,” resonated with the nucleus of the genre: It was shocking, subversive, and irrepressible. In 2021, the history-making record was nominated at the 63rd Grammy Awards, making her the first solo woman to nab a nomination for Best Metal Performance and drawing Poppy hard-earned respect in the tough-to-crack metal industry, a community still reckoning with its history of flagrant misogyny. 

Though the phantasmagorical world of Poppy may require some level of stretching one’s suspension of disbelief (one of Poppy’s early viral videos sees her earnestly interviewing a houseplant), she understands why people may try to make sense of her in more classic, binary terms, or pigeonhole her with labels such as “pop star” or “metal artist.” 

“I think the audience has a desire to differentiate because people want to subscribe to black-and-white thinking, like, ‘It’s all this, or it’s all that.’ The gray area is where I find room to dig into. I like the swings; I like the extremes. I like to play with the furthest-reaching ends of the spectrum in my music, but I think people want to be able to look at something and know what it is immediately. If they can’t put their finger on it right away, they either lose interest or decide they dislike it. But they say people dislike what they don’t understand.”

In spite of the satire and uncanny valley present in Poppy’s early work and YouTube videos, authenticity is highly important to the musician. So is staying true to her own unique vision, even if that means a more insular, protected creative process. Poppy often “takes inventory” of those in her life, to ensure she’s only around “people who encourage me to be the best version of myself.” 

“I don’t work with new people as often anymore. It’s hard to not become close when you’re creating music with somebody over a period of time. You’re sharing your experience and really personal details about yourself. I can sense from a first interaction if something’s gonna work out or not, even in the first 30 minutes,” Poppy admits.

Yes, she’s willing to collaborate, but compromise isn’t in her vocabulary: “There are people I worked with really early on who said, ‘You’re trying to do too many things at once.’ So I stopped working with them. The team I work with now has never said that to me — and they wouldn’t, because that’s how I work. I have to do everything I’m interested in, always. Otherwise, I’d be a very unhappy person. We’re only here for a limited time, so if there’s something that piques your interest and you feel magnetized toward, explore it. If it works out, good. If it doesn’t, good. At least you’ll know.”

Though protective of her art, Poppy, whose real name is Moriah Rose Pereira, appears to have become somewhat less guarded and more relaxed over the years, especially with regard to her public-facing persona, including in interviews. Poppy is conversational and candid as she chats with me over Zoom. She laughs while referencing a random Toy Story scene, says “thank you” a lot, and empathically, intently listens when I share the vivid doomsday nightmare I had the night before our interview. (“We could be hit by a meteor. I’m reminded of that every day when I wake up. It could all end right now. I have those dreams all the time,” she commiserates.)

At the same time, Poppy takes long pauses to gather her thoughts between questions, and speaks slowly and precisely — not so much careful with her words, but instead mindful to accurately and succinctly convey her feelings and opinions. “I think those who say I’ve been more open [lately] have just been following me for a while and sense more evolution,” she muses. 

Even so, Poppy maintains a considerable wall of privacy online, especially for someone so tied to and tapped into the digital zeitgeist. Her TikTok account is a tightly curated collection of music video footage, promotional clips, and dreamlike videos reminiscent of her early viral YouTube vlogs. Her Instagram is similarly arrayed — a stream of glossy photo shoot pics, merch and tour promos, and behind-the-scenes shots that don’t show too much. You won’t find any vacation candids or late-night hot takes on her grid. She prefers it that way. 

“I surrendered a lot of social media to my team because I’m a sensitive creature. I think a better use of my time is going to the studio, or going to a dance class, or taking care of what I need to and not narrating it. Some people do that and that’s what they enjoy, but I’m not one of them. I feel the desire to keep some things for myself,” she explains. Besides, “everybody online is a stranger, anyway.” Poppy wouldn’t walk up to somebody on the street and tell them her personal information: “That would be a little odd, and I view the internet the same way. It’s not my diary, so I don’t feel the need to treat it that way.”

In early 2023, Poppy alarmed fans when she suddenly deactivated her Twitter — sorry, X — account. There was no dramatic reason for the deactivation; the increasingly maligned micro-blogging platform just wasn’t making her happy anymore. 

“I’ve always disliked Twitter. Maybe it had better intentions at its genesis, but I think it’s a bad platform. People feel like just because they have a Twitter they should be able to give an opinion about things. Maybe some of your opinions you should keep to yourself and think about a little bit longer, to decide whether [or not] you actually have a valid stance on what you’re projecting out into the abyss of the internet. Maybe hold it for a second, consider, and then act. Reactivity is not always the best.”

Like a post-genre pop phoenix, Poppy relishes in shedding the old and taking on a brand-new form when inspiration strikes. Recorded alongside longtime collaborator Simon Wilcox and new industry pal Ali Payami, who previously worked with pop heavyweights the Weeknd, Taylor Swift, and Ariana Grande, Poppy’s fifth studio album is unlike anything she has released before. 

Zig owes itself to Nine Inch Nails just as much as it does to mid-to-late 2000s electro-rock by the likes of Glass Candy, Ladytron, and Heartsrevolution. The album is immersed in brooding, pitch-black pop and dark disco, but it also leans into driving ’90s industrial (“Church Outfit”), melodic baroque pop (“What It Becomes”), and grimy electroclash (“Hard”). “Linger” sounds like a lost goth Britney Spears ballad — “Everytime” 2.0 by way of Evanescence — while “The Attic,” her “most personal” track on the album, sees Poppy experimenting with glitched-out drum and bass. 

These disparate sonic inspirations are surgically stretched and twisted into something entirely unexpected. To that effect, Zig retains Poppy’s signature juxtapositions. She continues to play with the dichotomies and contrasts that made her so compelling in the first place — authenticity vs. artifice; soft vs. harsh; quiet vs. loud — all while the beat goes on and on. 

Poppy says Zig is a dark dance record at its core. “I wanted to make music that I could dance to. That was the centerpiece for everything else. I wanted to have dance music videos, so we started there,” she explains. This musical manifesto makes even more sense considering Poppy took dance classes for 11 years and once dreamed of becoming a Rockette when she was a child.

The spooky music video for single “Knockoff,” which features tarot card imagery (“I’ve actually never done tarot!”), sees Poppy gyrate and twist sensually, a woman in control of her body and destiny. In the video for “Church Outfit,” Poppy twitches, twists, and contorts herself cathartically, as if releasing something from deep within. The visuals were choreographed by Zoi Tatopoulos, whose “animalistic, primal” style of dance Poppy credits with helping her to unleash the emotion of the songs in a visceral way. “Expressing yourself through movement is very powerful and emotional. I can watch videos of dance for hours and hours. Combining [dance] with song feels whole to me,” she says.

Poppy isn’t hesitant to voice her needs, desires, and boundaries. She lays down a lot of personal declarations on Zig, whether she’s singing about being her own advocate on “Hard” or expressing her creative freedom on “Motorbike.” “I am mine and you are mine and I am not yours,” she sings at one point on the album. “Want that real shit, real authentic,” she demands elsewhere. “To sing [those lyrics] every night on tour, you have to mean them. Otherwise, what are you even saying?” Poppy explains. 

Meanwhile, Zig’s abrasive, unapologetic titular track is an anthem for being unpredictable. “When you zig, I zag, I zigzag,” Poppy proclaims over a sharp-edged, skittering beat, the track slowly unraveling into a full-blown nü-metal frenzy. (Some fans theorize that Zig is part one of a two-part album, with a future record called Zag to follow. When I ask, Poppy tells me fans are simply “gonna have to wait and see.”)

Poppy hasn’t slowed down for a moment in the two years since the release of her fourth studio album, 2021’s punk-tinged alt-rock album Flux. “I have to be busy. There’s never a moment where I’m sitting down doing nothing,” she admits. She toured with the Smashing Pumpkins, went on “lots of adventures” around the world in places like Tokyo and Amsterdam, and signed three new record deals. “I made an album, then I abandoned that album, and then I made another album — Zig,” she says. 

And that’s the thing about Poppy: She’s constantly zigzagging, swerving, and surprising everyone around her. You’ll never catch up to her. All you can do is enjoy the ride. “I’m just leading by interest,” Poppy says. “If it’s interesting to me, that’s what I’m after. I’m not stopping to ask permission from those around me. The moment you stop to ask if it’s OK, that’s when you end up duping yourself.”

Styling by Erik Ziemba at Paradis

Makeup by Jaime Diaz at Paradis using Isamaya Beauty

Hair by Mikey Lorenzano