The metamorphoses of Poppy, which now turns “Last Christmas” upside down

Magnetic and subversive personalitya figure capable of breaking down boundaries and conventions, Poppy has chosen to transform the sweet melancholy of Christmas into a sound explosion, distorting a classic, “Last Christmas” by Wham!, in a cover with more ferrous and abrasive sounds. However, without completely abandoning the more reassuring lights of pop. In the universe of the 30-year-old American artist, where sweetness mixes with darkness and the melody twists between digital glitches and distorted guitars, too a Christmas classic becomes living matter to be manipulated and set fire. Poppy thus continues to shake up tradition and renew his character as few artists can do.

Born Moriah Rose Pereira, Poppy has gone through more metamorphoses than an android in revolt, making image changes her trademark. From the YouTuber who repeated “I’m Poppy” for ten minutes in one of her first viral videos, to the artificial intelligence embodied on the 2017 album “Poppy.Computer”, the figure of the artist has always been a theatrical enigma. Candid and disturbingwith an oscillating vocal register between innocence and cryPoppy has an ongoing goal of reaffirming that she’s not just a pop star. On the album “Am I a Girl?” of 2018 we could already glimpse a desire to intertwine various musical styles and reflect on issues concerning identity, gender and control systems. The turning point came with “I disagree” in 2020, in which the singer-songwriter completely broke down the wall between pop and metal, saying goodbye to the “computer girl” to embody a musical mutant and make his vocal cords learn fury with the same nonchalance with which a robot would learn to cry. After two more studio works, it is in 2024 with “Negative spaces“that Poppy has made her biggest breakthrough in metal, collaborating with Jordan Fishalready among the ranks of Bring Me the Horizon, for bringing a new, heavier dimension to his sound.

A bigger leap then occurred thanks to the collaboration with the hardcore band dei Knocked Loosewith whom the singer-songwriter duetted in the single “Suffocate“. The song, in addition to obtaining a Grammy nomination for “Best Metal Performance”, gave the same band originally from Kentucky such an unpredictable exposure that they ended up shocking the audience of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” with a live performance to present their third studio album, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to“. Only the performance of the first piece in the setlist was broadcast live on television, “Suffocate” with Poppybut Knocked Loose’s entire appearance on the show had represented an epic victory for the most extreme music. In that breaking image, which even raised controversy among the viewers of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”, outraged by the sound fury broadcast in prime time, the singer now presented herself as a force of the hardest sceneimposing a flashy, pressing self-image that is decidedly outside the “traditional” television context.

It is in this sense that the cover of “Last Christmas” comes not just as a bizarre experimentbut like the definitive staging of that passage. From the glossy and digital world of YouTubers, to the dirty and real stage of heavy music, Poppy has joined forces with Jordan Fish, inheriting a compact and more direct wall of sound to accompany a Christmas text. There is therefore an ambiguous complicity with tradition at play as it is devastated from within. “Poppy skips Halloween and goes straight to Christmas,” joked the title of “Metal Injection.” We spectators and listeners, faced with these continuous transformations, just have to stand at the edge of the mosh-pit that Poppy has opened and enjoy it.