POPPY - Empty Hands

There's a sense of constant pressure running through "Empty Hands", as if the future were no longer a horizon but background noise, a continuous growl. Poppy opens her new album with this awareness: there's no waiting, no promise, only the anticipation of impact. It's not an aesthetic detail, but a statement of intent.

The record is born inside a saturated present, where aggression has become automatic, language has learned to lie well, and even the gaze is no longer a guarantee of truth. It's a level of political and symbolic clarity that comes as a surprise, especially given the public image of an artist often perceived as artificial, constructed, "easy". "Empty Hands" instead works precisely on this short circuit: formal accessibility and real unease.

Sonically, Poppy pushes to its extreme conclusions the path she's been following in recent years. If “I Disagree” (2020) and “Negative Spaces” (2024) were transitional records, here the move into metal territory is head-on. The opener “Public Domain” sets the tone immediately: industrial pop-metal with a martial gait and compressed riffs. Poppy flirts with kitsch without being swallowed by it. It's an ambiguous choice, deliberately exposed, that makes clear right away that “Empty Hands” isn't afraid of sounding big, polished, even mainstream.

The heart of the album lives on an unstable balance between controlled brutality and pop instinct. The song structures stay compact, recognizable, rarely adventurous, but they work as vessels for tension rather than exercises in style. Tracks like “Bruised Sky” and “Guardian” move within modern metalcore coordinates, with stop-start riffs, incisive grooves and choruses designed to stick. Here Poppy's pop pedigree comes through clearly: the songs are immediate, already “pre-digested”, built around her voice as the central axis. It's a clear advantage in terms of impact, but also one of the record's structural limits.

When the album really does dare, though, the results are striking. “Dying To Forget” is one of the finest moments of her recent career: contemporary hardcore, crushing rhythms, visceral screams coexisting frictionlessly with clear melodic openings. The shift between violence and accessibility doesn't feel forced but natural, as if the two souls of the record had finally stopped fighting each other. The same goes for the title track, which closes the album by pushing toward near-deathcore territory, amid blast beats, dissonant guitars and a ferocious vocal performance, broken by sudden melodic fractures. This is where Poppy really seems to drop the mask, revealing a technical control and expressive intent that go beyond mere provocation.

Not everything, however, holds up to the same level of intensity. The stylistic consistency, which on one hand strengthens the album's identity, on the other breeds a sense of excessive familiarity. Some tracks (as with “Time Will Tell” and “Ribs”) give the impression of recycling solutions already explored, like variations on a formula that works but is starting to wear thin. Even the interludes come across as more decorative than necessary, hinting at a concept idea that remains only partially developed.

A fundamental question thus remains unresolved: is “Empty Hands” a metal album, or a pop album that uses metal as its language? The answer, probably, is that it doesn't want to choose. Poppy remains a solitary figure, a project centered on a single presence, where the band and the instrumentation serve to build the image. The American artist delivers a solid, at times powerful work that forgoes constant surprise in favor of consolidating a shape. She doesn't reach out her hands, then: she leaves them empty. And it's precisely in this suspension, between control and surrender, that the record finds its most convincing voice.

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02/02/2026