Poppy - "Zig"

Another failed experiment

Poppy is the stagename of Moriah Rose Pereira, a singer, songwriter, and YouTuber Originally from Boston, MA (though she spent her teen years in Nashville, TN, and now lives in LA). She originally gained a following with an android act, making satirical comments on the state of society, but moved to making music in the mid-10s.

Her early success in satire is important to note because, musically-speaking, Poppy doesn’t play by the rules. Her music leans further into Experimental territory with every album, it seems. Her earliest albums (2017’s Poppy.Computer and 2018’s Am I a Girl?) were heavily labeled as pop efforts by critics; she has begun working in more and more electronica and metal elements, though. And in Zig, her fifth album, she sometimes disregards conventional music theory entirely.

Zig contains a blend of Pop, Electronica, and Metal elements: Dark Pop, Industrial Pop/Metal, Metalcore, Electropop, and more. The metal elements are more for, say, ‘depth of flavor’ than true genric elements, but you can’t ignore the heavy guitar, bass, and harsh vox when they come in. The blend of styles is often pretty well done, though.

The album really falls apart, though, with its repetition. The songs aren’t long (the longest is only just over three-and-a-half minutes, but most are in the two-minute range. And yet, many songs are incredibly repetitive — lyrically and melodically. And few songs have much more to them than a mediocre hook, title track “Zig” being no exception.

There is a streak of tracks at the end of the album, immediately following “Zig”, which stand head-and-shoulders above the rest: “Linger” and “The Attic”, and, to a lesser extent, “Motorbike” and “Prove It”, are the best-conceived and -executed tracks on the album. They showcase more of what Poppy is actually capable of.

But it’s really too little, too late.

With the frequency of her releases, I would suggest that maybe the quality of her albums might improve with a longer gap between albums, but Zig is the first album to get a two-year window, and it’s still not much better than 2021’s Flux, which fell into the same bucket.

Rating: Orange