Hi, everyone. Face-the-New-Slap-Tano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new Poppy album, Empty Hands.

Okay, let's talk about Poppy, the once internet phenomenon-turned-mainstream metal star who has now just dropped her seventh full-length studio album, Empty Hands. The record was co-produced and written by none other than Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me The Horizon fame, with whom Poppy worked on her last full-length album, Negative Spaces, which dropped just a few years ago. That record was pretty well received for her. The reception was certainly warmer than that of her previous effort, Zig, in 2023.

In retrospect, Negative Spaces was a record that really affirmed Poppy's position as a serious modern metal musician. What I mean by that is her first flirtations with the genre in the 2010s were usually pretty over the top, campy, marked with enough quirk that if she were to decide at any point to change course and do something else musically, that you could laugh it off a little bit and say, 'Yeah, those songs were cool, but maybe it wasn't ultimately the move for me,' which I think was an understandable play at the time, given that most of POPPY's fans were not metalheads by any means.

But lately, she's been doing more to align herself with some of the genre's biggest stars today, or at least the ones that are relevant to her lane and style. Like in 2025, she embarked on a whole South American tour opening up for Lincoln Park. She also teamed up with Baby Metal for a track on their newest LP, and she recorded, too, with modern legends Amy Lee and Courtney LaPlante for the standalone single, "End of You".

And by working with Jordan Fish again, Poppy is essentially doubling down on everything they did together on Negative Spaces and maybe spreading out a little bit stylistically, because for sure in this new tracklist, there are plenty of pop friendly alt metal and new metal anthems to be had with a lot of jump the fuck up riffs and soaring melodic choruses with super touched up clean lead vocals. But at points here, Poppy and Jordan do lean a bit more into industrial metal and some metalcore-style riffs and vocals, too. Poppy is really screaming her ass off on some of these tracks against some brutally noisy guitar tones, leading to tracks with a lot of great contrasts like "Bruised Sky", powerfully heavy finishes, too, like on "Unravel".

Some tracks here are relentlessly vicious, too, like "Dying to Forget", as well as the closer, where it sounds like for a second, Poppy is doing an attempt at some really guttural pig growl type vocals. I don't know. It sounds nasty as hell. Really, it's the most aggressive her music has sounded since that random NXT EP she dropped a while back. But with that being said, even though only a few songs in this tracklist hit me as complete and utter skips, there was a serious lack of adventure to be had on this album, I feel, as I think Jordan Fish is starting to sound like more of a limiting factor than an X-Factor, someone who makes Poppy sound more predictable rather than elevating it.

Because sure, while Poppy's music on this record and on Negative Spaces has never sounded more marketable from a modern metal standpoint, all the eccentricity and the personal touch that made many of Poppy's first forays into metal, all the stuff that made it sound refreshing and maybe a little weird in comparison to some of the artists who were already operating in the genre, all that seems more or less sucked out completely at this point.

Either that or when you are getting slight visions of the old Poppy, such as on the intro track to this album, these girly, strange, flat vocal leads fit awkwardly against these marching, Marilyn Manson-type floor toms with rumbling bass and squawking guitar chords.

But yeah, at one time, the prospect of Poppy redefining metal or molding it into her own image, it was an exciting idea. But the further she goes down this road, the more it just feels like she conforms to these preset sounds and aesthetics that were already there before her. What was so subversive about the heavier moments on Am I A Girl? Or much of I Disagree is gone. It's just replaced with a lot of sounds and ideas that feel super derivative of the likes of Deftones and Linkin Park, which, these are fine influences to have make sense given the current metal zeitgeist. But Poppy and Jordan don't exactly put interesting spins on these sounds.

The most surprising moments on this album actually are cuts like "Eat the Hate", which sounds like a Nirvana style grunge track, but if you could make it two times heavier. Then there's a few surprises on the back end of the record where Poppy and Jordan work in a bit more electronica influences, glossy, dazzling synthesizers, break beats, and the like. However, even if these songs aren't as dime a dozen, they are some of the most awkward of the bunch here.

Meanwhile, anything else that's more tasteful, it feels like Poppy and Jordan are increasingly just painting themselves into a corner because the core songwriting formula, the combination of noisy riffs, clean choruses and the like, it doesn't vary up all that much across the length of the album.

I don't know. From here, I still have faith that Poppy can continue making interesting metal music, but I don't know if doing a second helping of tracks with Jordan was exactly the right move because it didn't really lead to anything new or exciting, outside of maybe a handful of harder, more aggressive cuts that, honestly, I wish made it onto Negative Spaces, which is why I'm feeling like a light to decent six on this album.

Anthony Fantano, Poppy , Forever.