Poppy - Am I A Girl?

Poppy
Am I A Girl?
2018
Spotify

In case you were wondering if we are living in the future or not, Poppy is here to make it pretty damn clear. The YouTuber and now singer has arrived with her debut record Am I Girl?. However in order to understand this record you first need to know a little about the person. Poppy's YouTube, which has amassed millions of followers, is a twee exploration of the surreal. Poppy is an android exploring her humanity, yes of course it is a character but it is through that character's eyes that we get the videos and this music. Poppy interviews plants, talks in this high pitched delicate voice and takes her viewers through wild artistic explorations. That's the videos, the musical side of Poppy is really quite different. Her songs still almost exclusively discuss fashion, robots and the boy girl dynamic going on in all of us. The sounds is this massive blown out pop, taking the genre and turning it upside down. You can imagine a girls bedroom, plastered with posters of her pop icons clad in pink, but then when Poppy comes in all of that turns a little darker, but also a little more surreal. It's like Pop on mushrooms, somewhat nebulous but still razor tight beats. What you really notice about this record is the very real push between Poppy's darker tendencies and her rainbow style of pop. "Time is Up" produced by Diplo is clearly a pop song but has this underlying darkness that is inescapable. Diplo wisely includes this sense of dread giving it a really full breath of experience.

If her darker leanings weren't clear by now the collaboration with Grimes will likely cement it. "Play Destroy" is an all out rock song: screeching guitar solos, plenty of very Grimesy lines and a real sense of wanting to make a real deal metal track. It definitely feels like a direction Grimes pushed, but it gives Poppy such a crazy weapon in her arsenal. Not everything works this well, especially when Poppy reaches for the middle. "Aristocrat" with Gariby is boring as hell as Poppy goes into trying to be some kind of royal consort over a song that sounds like a really basic pop song. It doesn't even feel like it belongs on this album, it has zero of the edge the rest of the record does. "Interlude 2" with it's disjointed bleeps and blops, sets the stage for a shift in the album, where things take their even darker turn, likely why the album was released on October 31st (spooky). The albums title track shows Poppy struggling to feel real in a world where she knows she's not and the rock aspect of the album begins to turn the fuck up. I mean, Am I A Girl? is weird and I know it. It is going to take a lot of convincing for people to by in on a fake YouTube personality having a stellar album, but the artistic direction and the music all work together wonderfully here. Give Poppy a shot.

8.2 out of 10