Poppy, born Moriah Pereira in 1995, rose to prominence when she was still a teenager
with a series of silly videos posted on the Internet.
Her videos were the invention of Titanic Sinclair (aka Corey Mixter), who had
already created the Internet persona of
Mars Argo (born Brittany Sheets) between
2009 to 2014, also curating her album Technology Is a Dead Bird (2009).
When Sinclair moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and broke up with Sheets,
Poppy was his new invention. Her first album,
3:36 - Music to Sleep To (2016), is simply third-rate sleepy ambient music, but the
four-song EP Bubblebath (2016) contains
the Katy Perry-esque Money
and
the infectious reggae-pop singalong Lowlife,
which sounds like
No Doubt
covering
Bob Marley.
Poppy.Computer (2017) contains synth-pop ditties like
Bleach Blonde Baby but also the
android ballet I'm Poppy and the psychobilly My Microphone that
make it sound more than just a parody of fashionable genres.
Am I a Girl (2018) sounds like a tribute to
old-fashioned dance-pop of the 1980s, like
Madonna
with the voice of a little girl
(Chic Chick). However,
X is a naive 1960s singalong that turns demonic and heralds Poppy's
foray into the world of heavy metal.
The EP Choke (2019), influenced by
Nine Inch Nails,
contains the
zombie-robotic hip-hop of Choke and the industrial hip-hop of Voicemail plus an incursion in manic metal like Scary Mask.
This EP marked a quantum leap forward in quality.
She also ventured into the field of graphic novels with "Genesis 1" (2019).
I Disagree (Sumerian, 2020), produced by Chris Greatti and Zakk Cervini,
is a confused work that has the main merit of rescueing her from the depths
of conventional dance-pop.
She spends much of the album fusing
pop, metal and industrial, concocting a dejavu of the 1990s (notably Anything Like Me).
The clumsy metal-rap of Bloodmoney amounts to little more than a declaration of intents, but the
Bite Your Teeth is finally a display of real cross-genre intelligence:
percussive nightmare, evocation of the riot-grrrls and fragile dreamy lullaby,
all in one song.
She still excels at childish rigmaroles, and here the winner is Concrete,
boasting a catchy refrain a` la Primitives.
The other (tender) side of Poppy's persona shows up in the
delicate ballad Nothing I Need and in the neo-soul elegy Sick of the Sun, which seem to belong to a different album.
At the end of 2019 Poppy had announced that she was partying ways with Titanic Sinclair, and Music to Scream To (2020) was the first album to be fully composed and produced by her. Ostensibly the soundtrack accompanying her graphic novel "Poppy's Inferno": it contains six pieces of amateurish noise.
Free from the influence of Titanic Sinclair,
the EP Eat (2021) was devoted to melodic metalcore.
The feral shrieking of Eat introduced a new musical persona.
Say Cheese mixed panzer metal riff, sweet melody and jazz piano.
Even better was the anthemic Breeders (that surely sounds like a tribute to the Breeders).
Her angry album
Flux (2021) is mostly devoted to generic pop-metal of the 1990s (Flux) and supersonic punk-pop (Lessen the Damage), although often interrupted by sweet girlish refrains (for example, Bloom).
The EP Stagger (2022) contains four songs of mediocre hardcore,
followed by the single Knockoff and the album
Zig (Sumerian, 2023).
