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A Grammy-winning Taylor Swift producer, a multi-platinum pop songwriter for Nick Jonas and a shapeshifting YouTube star-turned-heavy-music phenomenon walk into a bar…
There's no joke here, it's just the truth. Poppy's been hitting the town. The 28-year-old musician and her longtime co-songwriter Simon Wilcox have become "three peas in a pod" with mainstream pop architect Ali Payami.
And if you go to the right Los Angeles hotspot, on the right night, when the lighting is proper, you just might catch a glimpse of this unlikely trio having the time of their lives.
"We go out and we have fancy dinners, the three of us," Poppy giddily recounts to Revolver. "And we just talk about everything under the sun. It's great."
"And when I say out," she clarifies, "I mean only after dark and in dimly lit places. I like it to be hard to see. It just makes me feel comfortable."
Clearly, that sort of dusky, cosmopolitan atmosphere has been rubbing off on Poppy. Her most recent album, Zig — produced by her new bestie Payami and co-written with Wilcox — sounds like it's meant to bang out of the speakers, through the grinding bodies, and all the way up to the cozy balcony of a lavishly sleazy club.
"I intended it to be music that I could dance to," says Poppy, born Moriah Rose Pereira. That's a world away from the raw, aggressive catharsis of her previous full-length album, 2021's rock-centric Flux, and even last year's punky, blown-out Stagger EP. A lot has happened since then, so Poppy's in a different place now.
"I don't think I'll ever feel out of a transitional stage," she muses. "I'm less scattered nowadays. I'm very intentional about the direction and my steps, but I am, very much so, on a ride. I'm the driver in the vehicle, but I'm very much on a ride."
At the time of this interview, in late July, Poppy hasn't performed live in eight months. After joining Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction's fall 2022 run, Poppy was forced to cancel her solo dates after she came down with a debilitating case of the flu.
"It's really not like me to cancel shows. I get really sad," Poppy remembers glumly. "I was crying on the way to the hospital to get an IV, not being able to stand up straight, and then crying on the way back to the bus, calling my manager and saying, 'I don't think I can do this. I can't stand.'"
Another thing she couldn't stand was her record label. And upon returning to L.A., two things happened: Poppy healed from her illness, and left Republic Records soon after dropping the four-song Stagger. ("We tried it with an EP," she says of her brief time on the major label. "I started to work on an album while under their umbrella, but our ideals did not align at all.")
Now she's back with Sumerian Records, the modern-metal powerhouse known for djent royalty like Animals as Leaders and alt-metalcore champs Bad Omens, who had released Poppy's last several projects prior to Stagger.
For the fans who thought Poppy's return to Sumerian might produce another headbanging onslaught like I Disagree — her 2020 breakthrough that earned her the distinction of being the first solo female artist nominated for a Best Metal Performance Grammy (for the pop-metal collision "BLOODMONEY") — don't hold your breath.
Zig is yet another zag for Poppy, who's always reinvented her sound, look and thematic focus with each new album era.
There're still metal elements and experimental songwriting choices that anchor her in the heavy-music sphere, a lane she's occupied in the half-decade since she unhitched from the blonde-haired, plainclothes YouTube-video eccentric that comprised the first few years of the great Poppy experiment.
However, her platinum hairdo is back for Zig, as seen in the shibari warrior pose Poppy assumes on the cover art. Musically, the album is a decided swerve into more — ahem — poppier musical territory. The final product was the result of much deliberation, with her "completing" it at least a couple different times before going back to edit the track list into what we hear today.
"I feel like it tells me when it's complete," Poppy says of her album-making process. "We're always ever-evolving and changing, and I thought that it was going to be one way when I began the process. Then it told me what it was going to be, and I had to listen."
Zig pulls from a different sonic palette than the grungy punk of Flux and the chugging industrial-metal guitars that encompassed I Disagree. The styles and textures of the music are informed by Poppy's love of the eclectic breakcore pioneer Venetian Snares, as well as funereal electronic sculptors like Burial and Andy Stott.
The choruses are bigger and bolder, and her vocals are delivered with more swagger and suaveness. She still screams every now and then, but her howls are more backgrounded.
Zig mostly luxuriates in thrumming basslines and clobbering electronic drums, with synths that squelch like latex, occasionally shrieking when they rub up against Poppy's more-tempered-than-usual metal outbursts.
A song like the narcotically clanging "Knockoff" is like if Lady Gaga actually sounded as metal as she looked during her "Heavy Metal Lover" era. It's dark, sultry, a little bit eerie, but also insanely fucking catchy.
Elsewhere, she toys with manic hardstyle bass on the aptly titled "Hard," and gets outwardly playful and silly on "Motorbike," an ode to Poppy's fawning admiration for women who she sees rolling "with a powerful machine between [their] legs."
It's different, but undeniably Poppy, and she's quick to credit her intuitive collaborations with the likeminded Payami. Although he's best known for working with megastars like the Weeknd, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande — a mainstream echelon that Poppy has yet to reach (and, as we get into later, doesn't even aspire to) — she warmly describes Payami as a fellow "outsider."
"He's like me," Poppy explains. "He's outside of the outside. Like, if there's a room for the outsiders, we're in the hallway."
LAST TIME YOU SPOKE WITH REVOLVER, YOU SAID THAT THE STAGGER SONGS WERE WRITTEN DURING A MOMENT OF RECKONING WITH TRAUMATIC TOXIC RELATIONSHIPS YOU HAD GONE THROUGH. WAS ZIG ALSO BORN FROM THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES?
POPPY
I'd say completely different circumstances. Stagger was a very tumultuous period, and then Zig was written during a period of more… Well, it was throughout the course of a relationship that I was in. Actually, it started and it ended when the relationship started and ended.
Of course, some of the songs that are on that record have nothing to do with that relationship, but alas. "Flicker" is a song that's coming out with a visual, and the chorus of that song is, "I flicker between fear and a vision of forever," which is about being in less-than-ideal relationships.
My selection process has not been the best. [Laughs] I say that laughing, by the way, because I'm not sad about it. It's a little bit funny. But with "Flicker" it's like, certain things in love were making sense and aligning, but also, I wasn't being fulfilled and not all of the boxes were getting checked. It was like: This is something that I've never done before; let's see where this goes.
I guess I could see what a forever would look like, but I'm also terrified of it, and I think it would be a very unfulfilling forever. There's also points of feeling like somebody might be with you just because you are a bit of a mixed bag and not because there's an actual connection there.
A MIXED BAG HOW SO?
Me, myself being the mixed bag. Just being someone where you never know what you're going to get on any given day. That's alluring to some, terrifying to others. But in this relationship, I feel like it was appealing to the person that I was with, but they also didn't know how to handle it, and it left me feeling very hollow.
IN "THE ATTIC" YOU SING, "ALWAYS QUICK TO RUSH IN, ALWAYS ALL OR NOTHING." DOES THAT SPEAK TO THAT RELATIONSHIP EXPERIENCE AS WELL?
Yeah, historically I've done that. But also, it's coming to terms and finding similarities between how you deal with human interaction and relationships, and where they stem from when you are small.
Stumbling upon the similarities, and how a lot of things can be traced to the things you observed when you were not entirely conscious of what's going on when you're a kid.
DID YOUR PARENTS ALSO STRUGGLE WITH JUMPING IN TOO FAST TO THINGS, OR HAVING UNHEALTHY DYNAMICS IN RELATIONSHIPS?
Yeah, for sure. All of the adults that were around me always had very unhealthy dynamics, and that doesn't create the best situation to try to strive for.
DO YOU HAVE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR PARENTS NOW?
I don't, no. It's very complex, but I think everybody has that in some way. Not exactly with their parents, but any sort of human relationship; I think we're all just trying to figure it out. I left home when I was really small, so that always created a sort of independence for me and self-reliance of like, I don't need anybody to tell me what to do, and you've only ever disappointed me, and I'm the only one that has my own back. So, that mindset.
IN "KNOCKOFF" YOU SING THAT YOU'RE SEARCHING FOR THE "REAL THING." WHAT'S THE REALNESS THAT YOU'RE YEARNING FOR?
The "real thing" to me is love that is stable and consistent, and somebody that has done enough self-exploration to know that they're imperfect and love themselves in spite of that. That's the real thing.
DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'VE FOUND THE REAL THING WITHIN YOURSELF? OR ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR REALNESS FOR YOURSELF, AS WELL AS IN A PARTNER?
I'm definitely not searching for a partner, at all. I'm just going to put that out there: I am not looking. I am enjoying solitude at the moment, actually. As far as myself, I will leave that question open, because I'm just trying to float on every day on little bits of happiness.
I'm just trying to jump from one bit of happiness to the other. If it's my cat that wakes me up in the morning or if it's drawing a pretty picture or making a T-shirt, little things that bring me joy, that's what I want.
IS ENJOYING SOLITUDE A NEW SENSATION FOR YOU?
Yeah, I'd say. I think it allows space for your own thoughts. When you can slow down and be the observer of your own mind, there's more to it — instead of always trying to run from yourself and your thoughts and your living location, or to the next thing. When I say float on, I mean little joys in everyday life.
THIS RECORD HAS HUGE, BANGING POP SONGS. DO YOU SEE ZIG AS YOUR MAINSTREAM BREAKOUT MOMENT? WOULD YOU EVEN WANT THAT?
I feel wonderful about where I'm at. I think there are a lot of people with similar outlooks and understandings that could like my music or the message of Poppy or what I create, so I welcome them in.
But I don't think music should ever be something that gets made in an effort of becoming more famous. I think the right people will find it. I'm creating music to better understand myself, and I think the people that show up to a Poppy show feel that and they're listening to better understand themself.
RECENTLY, DOJA CAT AND OTHER ARTISTS, LIKE BAD OMENS AND ETHEL CAIN, HAVE PUSHED BACK AGAINST THE PORTION OF THEIR FANBASES WHO HAVE A VERY TOXIC, PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THEM. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE POPPY SUPERFANS WHO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU AND GO TO WAR IN YOUR NAME ON THE INTERNET?
I love my fans. I'm not familiar with what she's expressing or dealing with right now publicly. But I think that what I create is… It's something that I'm proud of and when I release something I want people to consume it in the form that I approve it's supposed to be heard in.
Once the song is recorded, mixed and mastered, and then released, that is what I approve of. But if any work is put out there, stolen before I deem it releasable, I think it's a violation of privacy. It feels like a psychological rape because it's a nonconsensual exchange.
That's not how the music is intended to be heard and consumed, and I think it's unfortunate. It's a violation. But I try to not look at anything that gets written about me or commented on. I have my team posting things for me, because I don't want to know.
… Social media is necessary in a lot of ways, but it's also unnecessary and unhealthy in a lot of ways. I think it's bad for our mental health. We've seen evidence of that at this point, and I think it continues to get worse.
ABSOLUTELY. IS THAT WHY YOU GOT OFF TWITTER?
I proudly deleted my Twitter, I think over a year ago. I've always disliked Twitter, and I don't like it when people use social media as their diary. I think it's very strange.
And also, everything else that gets wrapped up in it: People with politically charged stances and people expecting me to have a stance on certain things. I'm like, I am an entertainer. I am not a politician.
Styling by Erik Ziemba at Paradis; Makeup by Jaime Diaz at Paradis using Isamaya Beauty; Hair by Mikey Lorenzano
