Review/Commentary: Flux EP by Poppy

4/5 stars

Poppy is an artist that has never stopped evolving. She first rose to fame through YouTube, releasing uncanny videos of herself that were meant to promote her music career. Musically, she began as a pop artist, creating songs that were incredibly upbeat and ahem poppy, but also contained messages about being a robot that made the whole act seem like a parody
of the music industry she was a part of. Then, she rapidly took a dramatic turn into Nu-Metal which used her cheery, high-pitched voice to contrast with the intense instrumentals and subject matter her songs utilized.
Having firmly established herself as a metal artist with the album I Disagree, Poppy is beginning to transition once again, now to pop-punk. An important factor of this transition is that this is the first time Poppy is beginning to release music without her abusive and manipulative collaborator, Titanic Sinclair. Her newest EP So Mean is another step in this transition, leaning less on the screaming vocals she used in EAT and more on her usual cheery singing. So Mean is, without a doubt, pop-punk. Its lyrics are decent, but they lack some of the sting of irony that had always accompanied her previous work. This is possibly because Sinclair is
no longer involved, though it could simply have been the direction Poppy would have headed in anyway.

Either way, it’s great that Poppy is finally able to freely express herself and explore sides of her music that she had not explored previously. Poppy does really seem to care about the music she’s making now and is trying to be as genuine as she can with it. There is nothing wrong with this, and she’s still making good music, but as this transition attracts new fans to the Poppy bandwagon, it will also leave some old fans in the dust. Not everyone is going to love this new music, nor will they necessarily love the music she makes in the future when she inevitably revolutionizes herself all over again. What’s important though is that she loves what she does because there will always be listeners who love it just as much.