Poppy released a new video for her song, “Sit/Stay” which shows her in a padded down room, bouncing off the walls in a freakish craze. The artist is extremely thin and bare-naked, including a bald head with the exception of a strand of pearls, which is carefully laid over her forehead. The scene flashes against the beat of the track which has a feverish, alarming pitch and tempo, set against her vocals. She loses her mind between flashes of her wearing long, brown ponytails, looking innocent but still held captive in a prison-like background.

“Sit / Stay” is the sixth single from her latest album, I Disagree. According to a statement, the self-directed video is a visually arresting vignette set in medical isolation, where sonography and mind control measures cause Poppy to become disorientated as she battles through padded cells, under control of an unidentified source. The clip was directed by Poppy (with Aiden Ulrich as director of photography), edited by Garrett Nicholson, and produced by Psycho Films.

According to an mxdwn.com article, Poppy is steadfast in renouncing her former artistic partnership with musician and director Titanic Sinclair. In an album review of I, Disagree, the opening track “Concrete” is described as Poppy singing of the death of her former self, of being buried and covered in concrete, “turn me into a street,” she pleads. She also sings of the disillusionment of the world we live in on the album’s title track and the first part of “Don’t Go Outside,” among hypocrisy and religion as other notes of mental snark. For the most part, all of this is delivered with vocal innocence; the music behind it serves as a place of aural contention. There are elements of grindcore, nu-metal, heavy metal and basically anything one wouldn’t associate with bubblegum sweetness.

Poppy is taking matters into her own hands, according to an article in mxdwn.com which states that she is changing the course of her music career from Popstar to Metal Goddess. Many fans were very surprised to see and hear Poppy’s latest jump into her badass roll in the metal scene. From the latex gloves she wears to the BDSM masks on her metal band in the video, it is clear that the singer is taking ownership of her new genre.

In late 2016, Poppy became the face of Sanrio’s “Hello Sanrio” collection. In the summer of 2017, she signed to Mad Decent, and in October released her first studio album, Poppy.Computer. To promote the album she embarked on her first tour, which consisted of 34 North American cities separated by shows in London and Tokyo. In 2018, she released her web television series, I’m Poppy, and her second studio album, Am I a Girl?

Photo credit: Ekaterina Gorbacheva