Review: Poppy’s I Disagree Obliterates the Niceties of Genre Convention

In many ways, Poppy was an inevitability: a YouTube personality turned pop singer, portrayed by Moriah Rose Pereira as a cyborg controlled by “them”—referring, presumably, to co-creator Titanic Sinclair and the duo’s actual or imagined corporate overlords. From Alice Cooper to Lana Del Rey, there’s a storied history of musicians concocting personae for public consumption, but Pereira has taken the gimmick to absurd, if predictable, lengths, conducting entire interviews as a soft-spoken, obedient automaton that seems culled directly from a straight male fantasy. Poppy’s early YouTube videos were glorified ASMR porn, featuring the singer sensually licking cotton candy from a stick and blankly answering a disconnected rotary phone, an ominous male voice—presumably Sinclair’s—occasionally posing questions to her like a sexual predator might to a captive.

For Pereira and Sinclair, with whom the former recently cut ties, Poppy is a commentary on social media and a satire of how we use the internet more broadly. But Pereira’s decision to finally break character during an interview with NME last year represented a more intriguing development, conveniently doubling as an extension of the Poppy narrative, wherein she becomes sentient, and a reflection of Pereira’s ostensible real-life struggles as a female artist.

Though Poppy’s third album, I Disagree, was largely co-written by Sinclair, it’s littered with allusions that telegraph Pereira’s creative and personal emancipation from him. “Godspeed to the radio star/Stop the beat when they take it too far,” she delicately warns on “Sit/Stay.” Opening track “Concrete” is about the killing of one’s former self—“Bury me six feet deep and just cover me in concrete, please/Turn me into a street”—while “Nothing I Need” and the title track find her reevaluating her own values and those of others, respectively. “If only all of you could see the world I see,” she sings on “I Disagree.”

The album also marks a sonic rebirth for Pereira. Poppy’s first two efforts were defined by bubble-gum pop filtered through the lens of J- and K-pop, which, in turn, are influenced by American music, resulting in a re-translated sound that felt at once familiar and alien. I Disagree is decidedly “post-genre,” tossing Poppy’s pop aesthetic into the shredder with heavy metal and industrial rock, previously only hinted at on the tail end of 2018’s Am I a Girl? “Concrete” shifts abruptly between tempos and genres, between commercial jingles and Beatles-esque chamber-pop, all shot through with roaring electric guitar riffs. That might sound incoherent, but it serves as a bold, deftly executed mission statement.

Inspired by a quote by British writer Alan Watts, “Bite Your Teeth” boasts I Disagree’s starkest contrast between thrashing verses and harmonious hooks, with a dreamy, almost ’70s AM radio-style bridge and a moody synth-string coda. The glitchy “BLOODMONEY,” which takes no prisoners in its skewering of religious hypocrisy, likewise juxtaposes abrasive noise-pop with sugary melodies, punctuated by blood-curdling screams.

These individual elements aren’t new to pop music—the album at turns evokes Rammstein, Sleigh Bells, and Lady Gaga—but it’s regurgitated and repackaged in a way that manages to escape derivativeness. Where Poppy does sound overtly imitative is on “Anything Like Me,” which hews extremely close to Billie Eilish’s brand of avant-pop—ironic given that the song is a response to an artist with whom Pereira and Sinclair have been engaged in a contentious copyright battle. The track, though, is more sonically expansive than Eilish’s work, an exhilarating guitar solo bumping up against the softly strummed acoustic guitar of the bridge, during which Pereira generously offers, “Love is never-ending in me.”

I Disagree’s final two tracks present a more promising direction forward for Poppy as she, presumably, continues to shed the artifice of her persona. Thematically, “Sick of the Sun” and the two-part “Don’t Go Outside” share a distinct sense of despondency: The former details the singer’s self-isolation, her unexpectedly emotive vocals couched in hazy, reverb-soaked guitars, while the latter shifts the focus to the world outside (“The TV says we’re out of time/Suck the fear in through your eyes”). The second half of “Don’t Go Outside” reprises several songs from earlier in the album, including the Marilyn Manson-indebted “Fill the Crown,” the sole track on I Disagree that veers into caricature. A lyric from that song—“You can be anyone you want to be”—takes on more potent significance when repeated here, the dream-pop approach charting a middle ground between the sugary dance-pop of Poppy’s earlier efforts and her nascent metal shtick.