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In October 2024, Poppy hosted a surreal variety show on Veeps called Improbably Poppy. It was a mixture of sketches built on skewed humour, violence and crude sexual references – the kind of show you would watch on Adult Swim at 3am after a night out. Across the six episodes, she would talk to a panel of three puppets that looked like Muppet rejects and, at the end of each episode, sing a song accompanied by a band called Rodent’s Revenge, featuring a weasel father and son.
One brilliantly strange sketch features a pale yellow puppet called Mr. Scib. It turns out that Mr. Scib is sad. Why? Because someone has started a rumour about him.
“What’s the rumour?” asks Poppy. “’Cos sometimes rumours can be true.”
“People have been saying that I don’t have any pubes,” he answers, downcast.
“Mr. Scib, that’s terrible! I’m gonna to get to the bottom of this rumour,” declares Poppy, and her outfit transforms from a monochrome polka dot onesie into a beige trenchcoat, a magnifying glass in her hand. As jazzy film noir music plays, Poppy crawls across the studio floor and interrogates a crew member, before a man in a black trenchcoat and fedora gets her attention. After agreeing to babysit for the man in exchange for information, he offers the truth: Poppy herself started the rumour.
“You’ve been telling everybody he has no pubes,” he explains, exasperatedly. “Several people have told you to be more discreet, but you just keep saying it. Was that helpful?”
“Incredibly,” says Poppy. “I’ve cracked the case.”
After Poppy reveals she’d had her fingers crossed when she promised to babysit, so won’t be doing it after all, the man is left shaking his head in admiration – “What a woman.”
The sketch plays with stereotypes, casting Poppy as both detective and femme fatale: intelligent, sexy, deceptive. The case, about a puppet’s manhood, underscores the absurdity of the patriarchy while highlighting the power of understanding it and subverting it: she can start an embarrassing rumour, claim credit for doing the job, doesn’t have to babysit because she doesn’t want to, and still be admired.
Or maybe it’s just a silly puppet show.
Nobody calls me Moriah Rose
Poppy
Poppy is a character. A YouTuber turned musician who has continually reinvented herself across seven albums, and toys with people’s perceptions. There are so many rumours and ideas about Poppy, drawn from her sketches, behaviour and songs, that fans even made an iceberg chart for her, listing stuff ranging from ‘reversed messages’ to ‘Illuminati’.
In a world where modern metal artists either document everything on social media or hide behind a mask, she’s essential – enigmatic and never boring. Later, we will ask Poppy how she feels when she works with puppets – whether it’s about pure comedy or something else.
“I see them as extensions of myself,” she says simply.
Before we chat to Poppy today, we want to know how to address her. Would she prefer if we called her Poppy, or her birth name, Moriah Rose?
“Definitely Poppy,” she says, without hesitation. “Nobody calls me the other one.”
We’re speaking to Poppy via Zoom. Her camera is off, so we ask if we should turn off ours. She’s indifferent, but prefers “a phone call type of situation”. We turn it off. It’s 8am and Poppy is in a room on the 20th floor of a hotel, in LA for recording reasons she can’t disclose, and wearing “sleepytime clothes”. The scene through her window is one of construction, high-rise buildings, and fast cars. Two days ago, she came back from Perth, Australia, after completing the first leg of her Constantly Nowhere tour. Despite the 49-hour journey, she is not jetlagged.
“Jetlag doesn’t exist. I think it only exists if you think it’s real!”
For her longtime fans, Poppy’s appeal is that she inhabits a playful character with a surreal take on life, who’s fun to figure out. Her early YouTube videos were like performance art, featuring Poppy – placid smile, deadpan delivery and outfits to idolise – talking to mannequins and reading from the Bible. Her breakthrough, 8-bit-inspired hyperpop single, 2017’s I Am Poppy, saw her intoning her name like a robot (‘P-O-P-P-Y – I’m Poppy!’).
Newer fans have had a different experience of Poppy, drawn in by heavy, genre-blurring collabs, with everyone from Bad Omens (V.A.N.) to Knocked Loose (the Grammy-nominated Suffocate). Her latest albums, 2024’s Negative Spaces and this year’s Empty Hands – produced by ex-Bring Me The Horizon man Jordan Fish – feature some of the catchiest songs since nu metal, while her rabid screams and anguished singing conveys an authenticity that’s prized in the metal community.
Listen to those albums back-to-back and you might come away worried for Poppy’s welfare. There are tumultuous lyrics with hints about toxic relationships and situations, and a strong sense of trying to escape and overcome – it’s relatable material. On Dying To Forget, from Empty Hands, she screeches: ‘For a heretic, you got a lot to say, but you’re the motherfucker in my way / Drain out the poison, now tell me what remains, rot in your piss in your shallow grave.’ Is she… OK?!
“Ha ha ha! I’m OK! Just don’t worry, I’m on the road. I’m in transit between one place and another, that’s been the last two-and-a-half years or so,” she says, in her soft, high-pitched Poppy voice, as if she’s making an announcement about staying calm while you’re on an aeroplane falling out of the sky.
There’s a really strong sense that you’ve been through some stuff, and have had to reclaim some agency. Is that fair to say?
“I think in the past, that’s been a bit more of the narrative, or where the press has tried to lead it in that direction – where I’m just a soul that’s been beaten down by the world,” she says. “But it is actually quite the opposite nowadays. I’m beating the world down.”
It’s difficult opening a conversation with Poppy, because she doesn’t like interviews. It’s something she’s expressed on her socials, and that comes up in our conversation later – “It’s unnatural for me to talk about what I meant at a time when I meant it, and it’s something that I hold so close. So it’s actually quite anxiety-inducing.”
Fifteen minutes before today’s chat, we get a phone call from Poppy’s PR, asking if we can avoid the topic of men.
You mean, like her former collaborator, Titanic Sinclair?
Yes, and Jordan Fish, comes the reply. Apparently, Poppy’s team want the focus to be on her, and not overshadowed by anything else.
That’s fine, we say – we were actually just putting together some questions about feminism…
This pre-emptive offensive is likely because of YouTube videos and online chat about Poppy’s past. In 2019, she acrimoniously parted ways with Titanic. No one deserves to have their past raked over without warning.
Meanwhile, some fans think Jordan has exerted too much influence over her current sound, seemingly unwilling to concede that Poppy is her own person. But we’d rather talk about why Poppy is such an exciting artist right now.
It feels like Poppy has undergone a shift, from projecting a deliberately artificial persona to putting more of herself into her work. While previous songs have been a 50/50 split between personal experience and storytelling, she says, on Empty Hands, “about 90% is real”.
Sometimes when you’re doing something you love, it’s OK if it makes you feel indifferent, too
Poppy
In the last couple of years, Poppy has spent a lot of time touring. Getting on and off the bus in different cities, going from show to show, living an existence most people can’t understand, has been difficult for her.
“The in-between moments allow for a lot of twists and turns in your mind,” she notes.
Conversations with the likes of Jordan, songwriting collaborator/House Of Protection singer/guitarist Steve Harrison, and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante have helped keep her grounded, and although she won’t reveal any advice they’ve given, she does offer an insight into her own state of mind: “I would just say to anybody that’s reading this later, that sometimes when you’re doing something you love, it’s OK if it makes you feel indifferent, too.”
When she feels indifferent, she writes in her journal, and later turns those scribbles into songs.
“Constantly Nowhere was written with a bit of that in mind,” she says, referencing the most bare-bones song on the album, which sounds inspired by Imogen Heap’s vocoder-driven Hide And Seek. “And in turn, that’s how we decided to name the tour, because it was how I was feeling – constantly nowhere,” she explains.
Poppy has been journalling for 20 years, and conceived of Poppy in her 2011 pages.
“I’ve always been into the performing arts,” she explains, “First I was a dancer, and then I wanted to sing, and I always wrote songs, and I felt like I needed to be the one to sing them.”
The first song that really unlocked the feeling of being Poppy for her was something unreleased that she won’t disclose. Of the ones in the public domain, unsurprisingly, it’s I’m Poppy.
“It was the introduction to who I am, and if you can make a hook out of your own name, I feel like it’s pretty important,” she says. We picture her like she’s appeared in videos – a knowing smirk creeping across a pink-lipsticked mouth.
The second song that unlocked Poppy, “more recently, on this route that I’ve been”, was New Way Out – the first song she and Jordan wrote together, and the lead single from Negative Spaces. Again, its lyrics speak to overcoming… something.
“It’s about a couple of situations I felt. To loosely name one of them… I had a conversation with my manager about wholeheartedly pursuing this, and a refocus of what I wanted to do,” she explains. “Up until that moment my focus was a bit scattered, and I wasn’t feeling as inspired by what I was working on at the time. I had scrapped an album I made that I found to be boring to me, and I didn’t want to play it live. At the same time, Jordan told my manager about this new venture he was gonna go on [after leaving Bring Me The Horizon], and he thought we should all work together. So, it felt a little serendipitous.”
It’s a welcome moment of candour from Poppy, but she soon reverts back to type, offering a prosaic and emotionally detached reply when we ask what the difference is between the Poppy that wrote I’m Poppy and the Poppy that wrote New Way Out.
“I don’t really think there’s a great difference other than experience, in the timestamp of life and when they were written and recorded,” she answers. “I’m still very much Poppy.”
If there’s some truth to what she’s saying, it’s that Poppy always looks and sounds like Poppy, even when collaborating with some of metal’s biggest and most diverse artists. When you see her brilliantly screaming in a forest, wearing a wedding dress, in the video for Knocked Loose’s Suffocate, while also stroking a beautiful white horse, you think, ‘Of course she’s doing that. She’s Poppy.’
She brought in Fever333 for Scary Mask in 2019 and sang on Dead Flowers with Health in 2021, but got more attention in 2024/2025 when she worked with Knocked Loose (morphing into a hardcore version of Poppy, appearing on Jimmy Kimmel), Bad Omens (industrial Poppy) and Babymetal (kawaii idol Poppy). Then there was the huge, triple-threat Amy Lee/Courtney LaPlante/Poppy anthem, End Of You (goth Poppy). Seeing three icons of modern metal singing about self-determination – ‘the end of you is the start of life for me’ – felt like a historic moment. According to Poppy, she chooses her collaborators based on vibes.
“It’s definitely important to me to have a friendship and a trust with the people that I’m working with,” she says. “And when I’m considering it, even before a song or a recording session, I want to meet them first for tea or conversation, because otherwise you’re trapped inside of a room you don’t want to be in, with somebody that’s boring. I’ve done that in the past, and it’s not how you get a good result. You can tell a lot from a handshake and a conversation.”
There is a man inside of my cat!
Poppy
Evanescence were a band Poppy listened to growing up, and she and Jordan went to meet Amy Lee at home in Nashville. Amy had a glass of wine, while Poppy had a water. “She’s very warm, she’s very sweet and conversational.”
Amy recorded her part in front of Poppy and Jordan, but Poppy wasn’t keen on doing hers on the spot, despite Amy’s encouragement.
“Hearing Amy’s voice in a room was so incredible,” Poppy says, a smile in her voice. “It’s so iconic. She was like, ‘OK, now you can do your part.’ And I was like, ‘It’s OK, I’ll record it when I get to my studio!’ And she was like, ‘I’ll leave the room’, and I’m like, ‘It’s OK, I’m in your house, I’ll just do mine later!’”
We wonder if Poppy had some nerves over it, but she talks around the subject carefully.
“I think I’ve always been somebody that prefers to track vocals with only the engineer in the room, because I like to be able to do as many takes as I want, and have the freedom to choose by myself,” she says. “I don’t like spectators in the studio, I’m pretty precious about that. It’s such a sacred time for me that I don’t want anybody to be in there. Some bands will invite their friends over when they’re working, but I just like to work, and nobody gets to hear it until it’s presented.”
It’s clear she doesn’t want to get too vulnerable – to give anyone a reason to speculate about her motivations or actions. A question about whether she has any doubts or insecurities about her career as Poppy, or any worries for the future, is met with short shrift.
“I just… am focused on now, and my internal barometer, and keeping the channel open and not letting other people dictate the speed of the operation. It’s not a narrative for other people to weigh in on. I think communicating any sort of personal apprehensions gives the spectator room to diagnose something in their WebMD-certified brains. I’d prefer to keep that personal.”
She adds: “I don’t like to hear chatter from people who I don’t know, and don’t have respect for. The people I have respect for are people I aspire to be like, who I have met in person, or maybe I haven’t met them, but their work has resonated with me, and I look to them for guidance or inspiration.”
Those people include Trent Reznor, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Outkast’s André 3000, David Byrne and David Bowie. We ask what she thinks of the recent 2016 trend, when people shared photos from the year Bowie died, and talked about how life was better back then.
“I don’t know the whole scope of what they were referencing, but it was a different time. It just feels very oversaturated and too much now. When you go to use the internet, you’re seeking out one thing, but then 100 other things get thrown at you, and you get distracted and derailed,” she says, describing modern overwhelm. “I try to mitigate exposure to that. And on the topic of David Bowie and his music, I think there are a lot of things that he was very on the nose about, musically and culturally, and now it just feels like everything’s a little bit much.”
David Bowie obviously had different personas. Is there a difference between Poppy and Moriah Rose for you, or are they the same thing?
“I am Poppy 100% of the time. Nobody’s called me that name in over 10 years or so now. My cat just woke up!”
If Poppy’s deflecting again, we can’t be mad. Cats are adorable. Hers is called Pi, and is apparently dressed in a duck shirt. She first took him on tour at five months old, so he could get used to travelling. On Crystallized, from Negative Spaces, she sings: ‘I was talking to kitty / Seldom broken and bored.’ Every cat parent knows what she’s talking about.
“He’s very communicative,” she explains. “I am thoroughly convinced that there’s a human inside there. At first, people thought I was a little… unstable. And then spending more time around him, everybody says, ‘Oh yeah, there is a man inside of Pi!’ He’s trapped. That’s why he could never go to a cat hotel, because he would probably try to hurt me.”
Whatever Poppy’s been through in the last few years, it’s clear she’s tried to heal from it. Again, it’s something most people – especially women – can connect with. We live in an age of wellness, of emotional and nervous system regulation. Besides writing cathartic music, she’s done energy work and talking therapy.
“Everyone’s just trying to make sense of what this is, when we’re spinning around on a rock in space,” she says.
In 2022 she told Revolver that she had been to see a spiritual healer a few years prior, who helped her with a long-term pain in her throat. It was, the healer said, the result of not speaking up. It helped, although she’s keen to point out that the healer’s practices are rooted in the body rather than anything mystical.
“I don’t believe in the palm reading or the future telling, it’s more about body-based and energy healing,” she explains. “And I was a bit sceptical, but then I was kind of weighing it up against how many people she’s seen in her career, and there has to be some sort of a legitimacy to it when everybody’s living their human experience, and then there’s certain commonalities between people that come in and out of their practices, for them to be able to identify certain patterns.”
She’s currently into breathwork.
“It might sound a bit shallow, but it is very impactful. There are books about it. I’m actually reading one I can give the name of… I think it’s called just Breath, but I wanted to give the author.”
Is it James Nestor?
“Yeah!”
That’s a great book.
“Yeah, it’s a great book,” she echoes, without volunteering any more opinions.
Poppy is an actor, a singer, and a provocateur. She is everything she says and everything she doesn’t say. And she’s one of the most exciting artists right now, someone who embodies what metal is in 2026 but also what it has the potential to be. Poppy’s built her career on a character, but as her music evolves, you wonder how her public persona will.
You can’t see her dropping the facade long enough to do a book club, like pop’s Dua Lipa, yet her lyrics and delivery seem more human than ever, showing the pain of being hurt and the strength it takes to reinvent yourself.
The glimmers of personality she shows make her even more likeable. You almost feel like you could be friends. One of her famous fans is Gen Z icon Alysa Liu, the 20-year-old US Olympic gold medal figure skater who made headlines by returning to competition for fun after a period of burnout, sporting bleached platinum halos around her dark hair. When Alysa posted a photo of herself, grinning with a medal in each hand, Poppy commented with three emojis: a flexed bicep, two pink hearts and a sparkle. Whatever Poppy chooses to reveal is ultimately up to Poppy.
After she cracks the case of Mr. Scib in Improbably Poppy, the sketch show that seems as simultaneously revealing and unrevealing as anything she’s ever done, she returns to him. He wants to know: did she find out anything?
“Shut up, you dirty sock,” Poppy says dismissively, no longer sweetness and light. “What are you, five?”
“What a woman,” he replies.
Of course she is. She’s Poppy.
