In 2020 Poppy was the "weird Youtube art project pop singer" that just recently had turned into a genre-bending metal/pop act. And I really liked it. At that time I spent some time listening to her albums before that, to see her development. And now six years later, I want to look back on it all from today's perspective, and ask... What the heck happened?
Poppy.Computer (2017)
Poppy - Computer Boy 
"Poppy is an object
Poppy is your best friend
Poppy will break your neck
Poppy will be your pet"
(from "My Style")
Poppy.Computer is the name of both Poppy's first album and the album's own website, and the songs are mostly about the YouTube character Poppy's "life" - she comes from the internet, loves being famous, and is a relatively carefree and personality-less individual. The album is cheerful and naive, reminiscent of J-pop, and like everything from Japan it tends to be cheerful and naive in an almost uncomfortable way. Many people find Poppy "creepy" because she
stands in empty rooms and
looks besides the camera while she talks, and between all the exclamations of joy, she suddenly says something dystopian and hateful in an unpredictable way. Her
Wikipedia page mixes facts about the character Poppy and the actress behind her, and videos on YouTube try to explain the mystery behind her without even understanding that she is a character - things like this may very well have fueled the myth of Poppy actually being that uncanny character for real, a myth that she herself tries to keep alive by rarely breaking character in interviews. The album is fun regardless of what you believe.
All of these are details that revolve around the album and give it its charm. The music itself is really good pop music that is neither elevated nor dragged down by the surrounding story, and above all, Poppy.Computer is the 2010s albumified. Despite its quality, the album has since aged hand in hand with The Emoji Movie, and has become a child of its time. Not in an embarrassing way though, but as a decade-defining album. It's
a historical artefact of both the social media world of that time, and of the origins of the artist Poppy.
The musical quality is pretty timeless, but it isn't _so_ incredible that you can see past how it's an album about the 2010s internet with music videos made to "do well on social media".
Am I a Girl? (2018)
Poppy - Chic Chick
On "Am I a Girl?", Poppy is no longer the emotionless robot who sang on Poppy.Computer. Here she begins to develop a personality beyond the one assigned to her by her creators - a bit cooler, a bit hotter, and towards the end of the album almost destructive. Judging by the album's name, Poppy is having an identity crisis and no longer just talks meta about YouTube, music and video creation, but questions things and shows a bit of human confidence, which brings the contents of the songs closer to typical pop lyrics than before. In that sense it's an odd album for Poppy, but to a new listener it may sound like her most normal one. "Am I a Girl?" is Poppy's second album, and at the beginning of it it sounds like her first album and then
at the end it sounds kind of like her third album, so this album is probably the best overall insight into the chaotic world of the Poppy art project (note: this was written in 2020, when these three albums were her whole career).
Choke (2019, EP)
I don't have much new things to say about this one, but the whole EP is good so
listen to it.
I Disagree (2020)
Poppy - Concrete
This is the album that made Poppy interesting to me back in 2020. Because of how much it differs from her earlier style, and because of how cool metal and pop could become when mixed appropriately. Here's what I had to say about it:
Categorized as both "industrial metal" and "sunshine pop", Poppy manages to make the most different expressions sound good together, and since she herself claims that music and the whole world are "post-genre" (
source), "I Disagree" has become an album where I first enjoyed the excitement of hearing beautiful pop choruses right after hard rock riffs, only to wonder shortly thereafter why all music isn't this free and conclude that genres, just as Poppy says, are uninteresting and outdated.
Poppy - Bite Your Teeth
Poppy started out as a social media phenomenon, a robot-like character without parents who just wants to make the world happy and cute, and sing. Moriah Rose Pereira is behind the character Poppy and she's so good at keeping up the act that it's hard to understand what's Poppy and what's Moriah. Over time, the character seems to become less robotic and take on a more complex personality, which is especially noticeable in I Disagree. From mostly singing about the internet with music almost as sterile as her colorless YouTube world, she has now become really dark.
... That's what I wrote in 2020. I really liked Poppy back then. The interesting thing about Poppy's "I Disagree" from 2020 was how she mixed her pop music with metal and other music styles, and how the expression of her character contrasted with that type of music. It was very simple on paper (a cute girl singing friendly lyrics over hard metal instrumentals...), but there was something deeper in it that made it great! The album was probably destined to be a one-off in how it played with the audience's expectation in a "punk" way, but I still would have loved to see a continuation on that performance-art adjacent character stuff.
So to be very clear, the interesting thing with 2020 Poppy wasn't that she made great metal music. Lots of others did and do that already. It was that she had a special vibe around her character. An ominous feeling, a bit of cringe (both the cheesy kind and the unnerving kind), and some (god forbid?) comedy!
Aftermath
Since "I Disagree", Poppy has released a couple of albums and seems to have rooted herself in rock and metal music. In 2020 it felt like Poppy could transform to just about anything the next day, because that's what she had done for every album up until then. But it seems like she transformed into a metal artist and stayed there (we don't know about the future though...).
Now she makes "objectively" better, but less interesting music. She lost that fun vibe around her character (she isn't even a character anymore even if she tries to trick you that she is with her music videos). 2025 Poppy makes pretty good music, but she is a mainstream metal group disguised as a solo singer/Youtube character, and it makes me a bit sad that she isn't a fun character for real anymore.
After thinking a bit, I realize that Titanic Sinclair probably was the one who added that fun conceptual stuff around the character Poppy. The Poppy project until 2020 was very much made by both Titanic Sinclair and Moriah Rose Pereira. And probably most of the fun songwriting was too (Poppy may still write good songs in 2025, but they're not fun like they were with Titanic Sinclair). Which would make Poppy's trajectory since they stopped collaborating more reasonable.
Titanic Sinclair - Shits To Give (from the album "Randy Speedboat")
Titanic Sinclair may or may not be a jackass (the rumours say that he is one, but we don't really know him or Poppy or anoyone else involved), but I still enjoy his work around the character Poppy, as well as his new music where he portrays himself as a jackass. I choose that over another decent metal band any day. Maybe it's just my personal preference to generally and consistently love art created by jackasses or at least people who are honest about their bad sides.
So it seems like what started as a collection of Poppy appreciating reviews ended up as a Titanic Sinclair appreciation post. Or an appreciation of good collaboration (at least artistically).
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