Like every year, Poppy started 2026 by celebrating her birthday. “That’s how it’s always been, so I didn’t really get to decide,” she half-whispers in her misty voice, telling NME how she marked her 31st year around the sun while the rest of the world battled New Year’s Day hangovers. “I spent the time with my cat, and we went out into the woods in a cabin.. I like my birthday. I think it’s a good start to the year.”
Straight out of the blocks, Poppy (real name Moriah Rose Pereira) is also about to unleash a record that will arguably set the bar for heavy music in the next 12 months. On Friday (January 23) – just 15 months after its predecessor ‘Negative Spaces’ – her seventh album ‘Empty Hands’ will arrive, carrying forward the momentum from a hectic 2025 that included 95 shows and two internet-shaking collaborations with Babymetal plus Evanescence’s Amy Lee and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante.
This pace, by now, is unsurprising. Ever since her enigmatic, peculiar YouTube videos initially made her famous, Poppy has been an ever-present character floating around the surface of pop culture. That’s filtered through to her erratic musical career, where she’s flitted between countless styles with ease. Her 2019 single ‘Concrete’ is the clearest example of this volatility, racing between sugary pop, knee-jerk metal and even glam rock.
But on ‘Empty Hands’, Poppy doesn’t pivot in the opposite direction – she doubles down. Teaming up with producer Jordan Fish (ex-Bring Me The Horizon) and songwriter Stephen Harrison (House Of Protection) for a second successive album, her seventh LP is another crash course in knockout rock and gnarly metalcore. After finishing ‘Negative Spaces’, she told NME that her instinct was that “[Jordan and I] have a lot left to explore”.
Interestingly, Poppy didn’t share that feeling with Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Paramore, Wolf Alice) and Ali Payami (Taylor Swift), the two mega-producers who respectively produced 2021’s ‘Flux’ and 2023’s ‘Zig’. “Every album process has been very drastically different,” she clarifies. “With ‘Flux’, I had a bunch of songs, we went into the room together and arranged them, and they became the album. The record after was a bit more mechanical and ‘pop world’ with pop people, and they don’t really have as fluid a process.”
In the early stages of her career, Poppy had a regular creative partner in Titanic Sinclair, before they split in December 2019 after she accused him of “manipulative patterns”. Until she found her rhythm with Fish, was she consciously searching for a recurring collaborator to fill that void, among the resultant merry-go-round of producers?
“It was a component that I acknowledged, that I would have enjoyed and liked to find,” she admits. “But it’s also a space [where] you can’t really jam the peg into the hole. It has to be the right choice… there’s a really nice point of consistency where you no longer have to explain yourself or your reasoning, and it’s understood and accepted. It’s the same with both Steve and Jordan.”
Despite sharing personnel and a number of surface-level sonic threads, the differences between ‘Negative Spaces’ and ‘Empty Hands’ are “very evident” to Poppy. “When the others” – critics and fans, presumably – “hear it and decide to call it a genre or put their goo on it, that’s up to them,” she retorts. “I know where the line is drawn. To articulate that gives a bit of a disservice to it, because it muddies the presentation.”
“Being able to detach from [the internet] and exist in your own head is really important”
Top and tailed by the mechanical, sassy march of ‘Public Domain’ and the title track’s onslaught of throwback metalcore, everything about this record feels cutthroat. No chorus hook, breakdown or synth break feels wasteful, fixed within an album structure that remains on its toes. At times, an underlying ’90s aura cuts through Fish’s slick production, exemplified by the Deftones-y ‘If We’re Following The Light’ and a riff that mimics Korn’s ‘Here To Stay’ in ‘Time Will Tell’.
Then there’s the bombardment of savage, second-person lyrics, peaking in ‘Dying To Forget’: “Rot in piss in your shallow grave / I’ll watch your kingdom fall / I’ll cut the brakes so your car can’t stop”. “I don’t really know if I would entirely consider the album to be an angry record,” she explains when asked what’s behind these lyrics. “It’s important for me to express what’s real to me in the moment. That day when it was written, I was clearly upset about something… but there are many tender moments and softness as well.”
Habitually cryptic and often coy around her lyrics, it was not too long ago that Poppy used to conduct interviews in character. Over the course of today’s conversation, she becomes increasingly candid and descriptive, as we get closer to figuring out what makes the human behind the rockstar tick. We probe her on one particular line, “I am constantly nowhere / On the roam”, which creates an intriguing duality alongside Poppy’s apparent ethos of everything, everywhere, all at once.
“When my friends would call to check in on me on tour, they would say, ‘Where are you?’ – I’m nowhere today,” she begins. “With the way that the internet is, information is out there – it’s everywhere – but it’s also nowhere, and you can detach from it by closing the computer. I remember at one point, making videos, I would say, ‘If it’s on the internet, it’s real,’ and it was a bit of a joke, because the internet used to be fake, and then it became real. Being able to detach from it and exist in your own head is really important.”
Poppy credit: Hector Clark
Poppy finds the in-between aspects of non-stop touring life difficult, a challenge she insists has prevailed “since the beginning of performing arts”. “I have to be offline when I’m on tour,” she explains. “It’s helpful for me to read books, write in journals, make collages and find expressive avenues that way. It feels a little bit dysregulating to be far away and looking at things through a screen where there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty or aggression online. I can’t look at that stuff. I’m too sensitive for that, so I have to go a bit more analogue on tour.”
Back home, you’ll find Poppy hibernating indoors for weeks, making up for lost time with her cat, who will accompany her on the road when she next tours North America. But this pace, this purple patch, is entirely on her terms. “I always have something to say,” she grins. “I’m always working… and when I don’t enjoy it anymore, I stop.”
This year marks one decade of Poppy, the musician. Her latest headline shows have heavily leant on material from ‘Negative Spaces’, 2019’s industrial effort ‘I Disagree’ and recent collaborative singles – effectively abandoning her other four albums. “I don’t really see those albums as much more than soundtracks to what I was doing at that time, and they’re not inspiring enough to me to bring into my present-day live show,” she elaborates.
That sky-high threshold remains Poppy’s driving principle. Teasing other projects “that will require my attention” imminently, she continues to quench any boredom with creativity, maximising that feeling of excitement that she craves. A workaholic, but first and foremost, a roamer – in the literal sense of globetrotting and the figurative sense of her imagination.
“The discontent drives the exploration, and I feel like that’s all I have, to continue to pose the question and ask myself what I want to do next. It’s not an open narrative with the outside; it’s about what I want to see myself do. If that is something that inspires or excites other people, then that’s exciting to me, and it works in a circular way, but quieting the noise to ask yourself those questions is really important.”
Poppy’s new album ‘Empty Hands’ is released January 23 via Sumerian Records.
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