The pop doll project hits a new lane of strangeness with lead single from new album.

 

The Poppy project has been an ongoing interest of ours since we first caught wind of it around the time of Bubblebath last year. At the time, Poppy was still under her initial moniker of That Poppy and was set on producing songs that sounded like your standard radio-friendly pop with cynical undertones. Bubblebath was quite innocent and less cynical, likely due to its release on Island Records, and was clearly a calling card of phase one.

Poppy’s debut album, Poppy.Computer, dropped last year and, followed by her cover of Gary Numan’s Metal recently, it was all moving in a straightforward line that built on her growing online persona. She was too robotic and weird to be pop, but still with pop undertones, and messages that veered between cultish and robotic.

In A Minute, the newest release and first to come from the upcoming Am I A Girl? album, is a different beast entirely. Instrumentally, it seems to float between strangely psychedelic synths, bubblegum pop tones, pop-rap percussions and R&B vibes. Vocally, Poppy at once sounds like she’s taking inspiration from rappers with pop aspects like Nicki Minaj – not least because the middle section feels a bit like Beez In The Trap – and also like shes continuing her own style of reserved pop.

In a strange step forward for Poppy, one that sounds less cynical than previous attempts but also with the lyrical simplicity and vacuousness that some songs on her debut suffered with. It’ll be interesting how emblematic this is of the upcoming album, but it’s hard to see where this fits into the narrative the project has been building lately.