Poppy : Empty Hands
I will be the first to admit that I am not the target audience for this album. Between its mix of radio-friendly choruses, nu-metal breakdowns, metal and deathcore chugs and interpolation of mainstream pop elements (at least post-Charli), it is a summation of approaches that have traditionally not been to my taste. A frustration since I Disagree was so exciting to me and Music To Scream To, it’s follow-up, was a bracing harsh noise record from someone who used to produce pop on YouTube way back when. And yet I cannot help but be charmed by Empty Hands. It signifies, along with the work of groups like Spiritbox and Bad Omens, a mainstream heavy music that I can admire even when it isn’t precisely to my liking. There is a distinct lack of a sense of manufacture tainting the work.
Take, for instance, Poppy’s perennially bracing screams. While the addition of heavy guitars way back on I Disagree was the obvious mark of her dramatic shift, it has been those harsh vocals she deploys that feel the most achingly sincere. Compare them, for instance, to the crooned Deftones-with-brain damage vocals of Sleep Token. Where that group can’t seem to decide if they are a metal band trying to ruin pop and R&B or a pop-R&B group making the Lord’s worst heavy metal, Poppy’s work over the past few albums (roughly from 2021’s Flux on to this year’s Empty Hands) interpolates both aspects of her sonic identity in an even fashion, applying pop hooks to heavy music and gnarly as shit guitars and blasts to otherwise pop frameworks. You never get the sense that she is faking her love for either end of her musical approach; nothing about Empty Hands feels disrespectful even when it isn’t always aligning with my ear.
The album closing title track was made, it seems, precisely for people like me. Driven primarily by traditional death metal riffing, it is a break, at least for a moment, from the pop/metalcore hybridization occurring over the rest of the record. Of course, a deathcore breakdown shows up and becomes the primary rhythmic counterpoint to the otherwise quite sick riff, but even this doesn’t throw me too bad, given again how commanding and real her vocals feel. She, along with Duplante of Spiritbox, convey a real sense of feminine rage that we otherwise have been seeing in artists like KING MALA and MOTHICA. This is not, of course, to detract from the broadly human aspect of that same rage; just that especially in the current moment having that extra gendered perspective offers something salient.
A song like “Eat the Hate” emulates the sound of grunge while “If We’re Following The Light” marries a Massive Attack trip-hop sensibility to White Pony-era Deftones atmospherics. Meanwhile “Constantly Nowhere” offers a brief Imogen Heap break while “Public Domain” apes Marilyn Manson’s “Beautiful People” but sans, uh… just Google it. Perhaps it’s precisely this range of material that is so catching to me. It would be easy to reduce her sound to a replicable pop single format, but instead she allows her work to range over a variety of approachable nu-metal and hard rock styles, all punched up with those post-PC Music electronica moves. There is a real ambition here married admittedly to pop instincts that are not my taste, even if I can admit readily that I hear what they add to this material in terms of a broader acceptability. Typically, that kind of element would be definitionally selling out; given how Poppy has introduced a crowd of people far younger than me to heavy and avant-garde music through her approach, I can’t help but see it as the inverse here. There’s a reason I keep listening to each new record of hers, hoping to find another as thrilling to me as Scream. Plus her sonic resemblance to Korn so often, one of only two straight-ahead nu-metal bands of aesthetic merit, can be quite charming.
Label: Sumerian
Year: 2026
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