Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante, Evanescence’s Amy Lee and Poppy have explained how their mammoth collaboration track End Of You was made.
In a new interview with NME, it’s revealed that the idea for the song, which came out on Thursday (September 4) following days of cryptic social media teasers, started as an idea between Poppy and the producer of her 2024 album Negative Spaces, former Bring Me The Horizon member Jordan Fish.
“I knew he was friends with Amy, and I thought she would really be a great person to meet and get to talk to,” Poppy says. “It was mine and Jordan’s idea to start with, and then we thought, ‘What if we made our version of a dark Moulin Rouge [referring to Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 jukebox musical], like Lady Marmalade?”
Lee was working with Fish at the time, with NME reporting that it was likely on her recent collaboration with metal-loving pop star Halsey, the song Hand That Feeds.
“Poppy and Jordan came over to my house and we flushed a lot of it out together,” says Lee. “The first verse came to me mostly cooked, the part that I was going to start the song with. It’s funny, because Poppy wrote my words and I wrote hers.”
Lee then reveals that Poppy’s drummer and guitarist recorded the drum and bass parts on End Of You, with Fish and Mike Stringer from Spiritbox doing the guitar tracks. She calls LaPlante’s vocals “the last layer that came in”.
According to Poppy, the nucleus of End Of You is the lyric “The end of you is the start of life for me”, which she wrote and showed to Lee and LaPlante
“It’s more of a universal message,” Poppy says. “I don’t want to classify it, but I know what it means to me. Watching the video of all of us together, it feels strong and powerful: ‘Imagine the things they can do when they’re united!’ It’s grounded in strength.”
Lee concurs, adding: “For me, it’s about taking on the patriarchy. In order to make way for the new, we have to let some old ways die, and I don’t feel that should be as hard as it is. I love change, and things can stand to definitely get a lot better than they are right now. It’s about challenging the norms and showing how strong we are when unified as women.”
Poppy, Lee and LaPlante enjoyed working on End Of You together, but it doesn’t seem that any more music from the trio is currently in the pipeline. However, Lee says that she’d be open to touring with Spiritbox and Poppy, and she even floats the idea of the singers appearing on game shows together.
“Now we’re in the phase of, ‘What fun things can we do together?’,” she says. “I don’t want to give it away in case it works out, but we were joking about game shows that we could possibly go on. I’m not kidding. We’ll see what fun shenanigans could come out of this collab!”
Poppy and Spiritbox have crossed paths multiple times before. Last year, Poppy performed the song Soft Spine with Spiritbox during the band’s set at US festival Louder Than Life in September. At the Grammy Awards in February, LaPlante was confused for Poppy during a red carpet interview. Video footage of the interaction, and LaPlante’s hilarious handling of the mixup, quickly went viral.
In June, Evanescence announced a handful of North American headline concerts for September, taking place between a show supporting My Chemical Romance and a stop at Louder Than Life, with Poppy serving as support for those dates.
Poppy released Negative Spaces in November via Sumerian, and Spiritbox’s second album Tsunami Sea dropped in March via Pale Chord/Rise. Evanescence are currently working on a new album, tentatively scheduled for 2026, and have released the singles Afterlife and Fight Like A Girl this year. It’s unclear whether End Of You will appear on the album as well.
Watch the video for End Of You below.
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