It’s worth pondering, for a moment, the remarkable collapse in metal and pop music’s boundaries. Back in the 1980s, when subcultural distinctions were probably at their peak, Iron Maiden were lambasted by their fans for the then-unthinkable crime of using synths on an album. Imagine pulling those fans to today and showing them the genre-smashing Bring Me The Horizon, the inexplicably massive Babymetal or the equally successful Poppy; a former YouTube performance artist who fuses ultra-modern technical metal with glistening hyper-pop, or whatever post-Brat term we’re now using for this current pop sound.
I’m sure our time-warped metalheads would have many other, probably more alarmed, questions to ask about the world today. They would also have to process plenty of nascent cultural changes that have impacted metal; namely how the internet has destroyed subcultural distinctions, along with the widespread prevalence of digital recording technology. Poppy’s ‘Negative Spaces’ encapsulates this current milieu. It layers colourful hyper-pop and synth-pop atop its razor-sharp metal, the latter of which possesses a brutally modern, intensely digital sonic palette; a crisp, pummelling digi-attack built out of ice-cold ones-and-zeros.
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To approach it from the two extreme polarities; the downtuned, seven (possibly eight) string-led heaviest tracks are a sight to behold. Tracks like ‘They’re All Around Us’ and ‘The Center’s Falling Out’ and as intensely exhilarating as any you’ll hear from a tech/djent/extreme metal band this year. Then there’s pure pop tracks. ‘Crystallised’ is a straightforward, sugar-saturated banger, glistening with the processed vocals and maximalist sheen of hyperpop. These more gentle moments frequently echo the synthetic textures and linear pace of video games, as do the heavy guitars, which serve as a reminder of the significant influence of Doom composer Mick Gordon on modern heavy music’s textural palette.
With musicians that fuse seemingly-disparate styles together, their strongest tracks are usually the ones that coalesce the various polarities with the most intuitive skill. Tracks like ‘the cost of giving up’, with its monster chorus and the Evanescence-style verses, or the elegant, Deftones-channelling ‘surviving on defiance’ are examples of the fusion at its most compelling. However, the extremes of Poppy’s sound are so head-spinningly thrilling, that the hyper-metal and extreme-pop tracks (to use some apt spoonerisms) feel as perfectly formed as the more ambitious amalgamations.
A stylish, impactful and accessible collection, ‘Negative Spaces’ is music for our post-genre, post-everything digital age. It’s a remarkable artefact of this era of music, one whose brazen confidence and flair will cave your head in to ensure your mind remains wholly open to its scintillating fusions.
8/10
Words: Tom Morgan
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