Boston inadvertently birthed two of the most interesting additions to modern pop culture, and nobody talks about it.
One is a YouTube sensation from the mid to late 2010s, a cutesy, almost robotic figure who accrued a cult following by frosting her experimental videos with saccharine synth-pop. Her unnerving performance art, typically filmed in blindingly white rooms, often toyed with commentaries about celebrity worship and the deification of the internet itself.
The other is a Grammy-nominated metalcore singer who’s risen to prominence since 2020. Through a steady flow of collaborations with acts like BABYMETAL, Evanescence siren Amy Lee, and Spiritbox frontwoman Courtney LaPlante, she’s asserted herself as one of the heavyweights — and leading women — in the genre.
These two figures are, somehow, the same person: the Boston-born artist Poppy. Neither era of her career is more or less “real” than the other. And if someone has the wrong idea about how or why her trajectory has zigzagged into harsh new territory? Well, she says, “I don’t really feel like it’s my job to correct it.”
Poppy said this matter-of-factly on a Zoom call from Los Angeles, roughly one month before the arrival of her new LP “Empty Hands,” out Jan. 23. The release will be her seventh studio album in nine years, and her fifth since switching gears between doe-eyed pop and jagged metalcore. Her lamblike speaking voice, one of the few constants in her career, belies her ability to project a gurgling, near-guttural yowl on any number of the face-melters she’s recorded.
“In a live format and recording, it gives this no-holds-barred, pedal-to-the-floor, all-or-nothing power to me,” she said.
Poppy got her first taste of heavy music in venues and record stores throughout Massachusetts, although until now, there have been few public details about her local upbringing. Born in Boston in 1995, Poppy said she grew up on the South Shore, before moving to Nashville in her early teens due to “a bit of friction within the family.” She pulled up stakes for Los Angeles soon after, and landed her first record deal at age 18 in 2013 (not 2015, as is often reported, she volunteered).
The core hallmarks of being a millennial Masshole are there if you look closely. Growing up, she spent a lot of time in Newbury Comics, and used to take the train to visit the Braintree location. She can tell whether or not someone’s a local by how they pronounce “Worcester” (“that’s the biggest giveaway,” she joked). Her music education, courtesy of a sister who’s “quite a bit older” than her, added Boston band Damone and Rhode Island noise-rock act Lightning Bolt into a feisty mix with L7, the Donnas, Hole, and Le Tigre. Some of her first concert experiences include P!nk at Avalon in 2006 and Paramore at the Palladium in 2007. (She’s since played the Palladium on her own tours, and has released a few variants of her records that are exclusively available at Newbury Comics.)
Parsing these early memories, Poppy explained her lasting impression of her life in Massachusetts is the “exposure to music, going to my first shows there, and the culture surrounding what heavy music was.”
It would be years before the impact of that music would fully permeate her own material. After releasing two pop albums in the 2010s, Poppy’s third studio album, 2020’s “I Disagree,” was a shock to the system. Chipper rainbows dissolved into sludgy earthquakes and thunderclaps. Just compare the opening lines of her 2017 debut, “Poppy.Computer” with those of “I Disagree.” One starts with the twee cheerleader-esque chant “P-O-P-P-Y, I’m Poppy!” The other launches into a recitation of “Bury me six feet deep / Cover me in concrete / Turn me into a street.”
The contrast was so stark, especially during interviews and public appearances, that some onlookers posited that Poppy had been playing a character and finally dropped the act to chase a career as a metal singer.
“I feel like that notion is quite condescending, I would even say,” she said.
In reality, the transition was triggered by the need to find music that would translate to touring with a live band, instead of “creating the music in a bit of a bubble.”
“Those songs on the first two albums were more about being a soundtrack, or an audio bed, to the videos that I was making at the time, and less about me touring on those albums,” she added.
Early Poppy devotees will remember how her first performances heavily mimicked her performance art, recreating the unsettling atmosphere of her YouTube channel. During a show at the Sinclair in 2017, flanked by two masked dancers, she even blessed and distributed a few cups of “Poppy beverage,” inviting fans to drink her brand of artistic Kool-Aid.
“It’s kind of funny when people talk about it as if it was a sustainable career path,” she said. “I think it’s silly. Those shows weren’t that big.”
But the drastic pivot worked. Poppy has since toured North America and Europe multiple times, both as a headliner and support for artists like the Smashing Pumpkins and 30 Seconds to Mars. She’s learned which countries’ airports have the best food (Iceland, Denmark, Finland) and found her best bet for a solid meal on tour (“plain chicken, plain vegetables, plain rice. Do not put sauce on it!”). One of the songs on the new album, “Constantly Nowhere,” comes from a common refrain to her friends on tour: “They’d be like, ‘where are you?’ And I said, ‘Nowhere.’”
While her demeanor and performances are more commonplace these days, the commentary isn’t over. “Empty Hands,” like much of Poppy’s recent work, taps metalcore as a raw and more direct outlet. The album’s title, she explained, reflects an effort to tune out greed and competitiveness, while “remembering that it’s not always about scratching and scraping to get by, and [getting] to a higher point on this imaginary ladder, ‘cause you can’t take it with you.”
If listeners interpret it — or any future career twists — differently, that’s their prerogative.
“I think it’s nice for them to not know and to misguide and miscalculate,” she said, “and I think it’s for them to just figure out their own relationship with what I’m doing.”
“But none of it really matters anyway.”
Victoria Wasylak can be reached at victoria.wasylak@globe.com.