Poppy - Negative Spaces
Are you gonna get up, or are they gonna keep you down?
This year has given major breakthroughs to several artists; perhaps one of the most intriguing among them has been Poppy. A lot more eyes have turned to the former content creator in 2024, largely due to her appearances on tracks from several major metal bands - “V.A.N.” with Bad Omens, and particularly the now Grammy-nominated “Suffocate” by Knocked Loose. Now, though, Poppy finally makes her own full-length solo entrance into the 2024 music scene, with her sixth studio album “Negative Spaces”. And what an entrance it is.
My expectations going into this album were set reasonably high - the singles showed a lot of promise. However, what Poppy ended up delivering on “Negative Spaces” turned out to be significantly better than what I was anticipating. This album comes with a great deal of polish and refinement in its sounds; however, while many artists lose a certain amount of their personality within a cleaner soundscape, Poppy’s somewhat mysterious, haunting air only feels like it experiences a rebirth of sorts in between the newly heavy guitars. She is still a deeply captivating presence on these tracks, and her vocal performances are fantastic - both in her great clean vocals, and her versatile screams - with deliveries ranging from high-pitched and desperate to aggressive and guttural. She also delivers some of the best metal choruses of the year on tracks like “vital”, “nothing” and “the cost of giving up” - they’re incredibly catchy, and carry a great deal of emotional weight too through a combination of the aforementioned vocals and the simple, but impactful lyricism present throughout the record.
The other crown jewel of this album, alongside Poppy herself, though, is modern-day metal icon Jordan Fish. The former Bring Me The Horizon member handles all the production on “Negative Spaces”, and contributes what is arguably some of the best work of his illustrious career. The sound of this record is incredibly crisp, grand and anthemic, but maintains every bit of modern metalcore’s aggressive edge, particularly within the more brutal tracks like “they’re all around us” or “the center’s falling out”. There’s also a shocking amount of sonic versatility, with the title track having a more hard rock sound to it, “push go” opting for a mix of that with prominent electronic elements, “crystallized” going for a borderline synth wave soundscape, and the closer, “halo”, having an almost lo-fi feel for the first two thirds of its runtime; Fish doesn’t feel remotely out of his depth in any of these, handling them all with great care and skill. The structuring and flow of the record is great too, with a common atmosphere present between all the tracks, amplified by the occasional interludes.
Overall, “Negative Spaces” is an exemplary modern metal record, and one of the best metal projects of the year. It shows a perfect combination of pop sensibility and the genre’s signature raw, unreserved emotion - something that is absolutely crucial in order to produce a quality “mainstream” metal album. With “Negative Spaces”, Poppy fully establishes herself as a force to be reckoned with in the alt-metal and metalcore scenes, and Jordan Fish provides yet another reminder of his status as one of the greats of the genre’s modern era.
8.7/10