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Listen to Poppy’s epic new single, Guardian
Poppy has released a new cinematic video for her single, Guardian – taken from new album, Empty Hands
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Poppy: “I haven’t really found my place. I’m an explorer, but I don’t feel like I’ve fully arrived”
In more ways than one, Poppy understands that, “There’s a whole world out there.” Be that playing almost 100 shows across the planet in 2025, or digging into fresh territories with her music, she is adventurous, curious and thrillingly unpredictable. Is imminent new album Empty Hands any different? Of course not. Come and join the ride all over again…
- Words:
- Emma Wilkes
- Photography:
- Megan Winstone
Poppy thrives off adventure. Her shapeshifting musical path across the past decade has been a voyage she’s designing for herself, twisting through genres with everlastingly curious abandon. Indeed, when K! asks her to sum up her 2025, “an adventure” is the phrase she lands on – though in a more literal sense referring to an extensive touring schedule. She was on a constant trip, which unfolded across 95 shows, six tours, 22 countries, four continents and a headache-inducing number of miles. In total, she spent only three months out of 12 at home.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she reflects from her home in LA during a rare quiet moment. “Then when you’re doing it, you don’t realise how much of a test it is in many respects. When you’re in green rooms in middle-of-nowhere places, you realise that these are the times when people feel like they’re going a little bit spinny.
“I think it’s not seeing the sun for months at a time that will do it,” she jokes. “It also means that you have to wear extra sunscreen when you play outside, because your skin will be ghostly.”
Such an intense lifestyle must bleed you dry sometimes, right? “It’s not in the way that one might suspect,” Poppy shrugs. “The shows I love. It’s more about the transport in between and the flying and the ways of survival that are more fatiguing. I like to be a girl! I have a lot of products that I take with me, and I don’t travel very lightly, so I have a lot of luggage and things that make me feel nice. I take them along. So there’s a lot of calculations in that too, and what goes into making it a more tolerable experience.”
If you hadn’t already added it up, Poppy’s never toured as much as she has in the last two years. It’s a byproduct of a huge upswing in her fortunes, bringing her to vertiginous heights she hadn’t yet touched. Her totemic collaborations with Bad Omens and Knocked Loose – the latter of which earned a GRAMMY nomination – made her part of two of 2024’s most important songs. Her subsequent album Negative Spaces, created with mega-producer Jordan Fish and Stephen Harrison of House Of Protection, was a masterclass in arena-ready metal, an amalgam of steely industrial atmospheres, sugary melodies and caustic heaviness.
2025 was just as collaborative, and just as frantic. Poppy joined up with BABYMETAL – a formative influence on her earlier music – for the zesty yet barbed duet from me to u ahead of their UK and European arena tour together with Bambie Thug in the spring.
“I had a really pleasant experience with them,” she smiles. “I remember the girls being very sweet, and the food was very good, and the weather was really nice.” From there, she dived straight into festival season in Europe, drawing a huge crowd as she conquered the main stage at, unbelievably, her first Download appearance. Between jaunts across the globe, she also somehow found the time and energy to make a new album, Empty Hands.
Perhaps the jewel in the crown of Poppy’s year, however, was forming a power trio of sorts with Evanescence’s Amy Lee and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante for a scene-shaking collaboration in the form of End Of You. It was Poppy who instigated the idea, writing with Amy at her house before Courtney added her parts remotely.
“I think it’s exciting when there are certain obstacles with it, but then it’s also exciting when you check your inbox for an updated version of what the other artist had done, and you’re like, ‘Wow!’” she says.
While she’s never been one to concern herself with external appraisal, she did get a slant of a sense that what they did was going to be received feverishly.
“I know three women in heavy music coming together to be on a song like this hadn’t been done before in this capacity.”
It would be easy to join the dots between these collabs, each connected to a tour entirely made up of female and non-binary artists, and see Poppy as someone helping to tip the scale in metal towards a more egalitarian future. The notion of women selling out arenas and headlining festivals becoming more of a normality than a novelty is closer to being a reality than ever. Yet, for Poppy, it’s always been more important for her to be seen as she is, on her own terms rather than on gendered ones.
“I just focus on what I have to say and what I’m creating,” she reasons. “And if that’s inspiring to others to want to join, then that is inspiring to me back, so it’s a little bit of a circle and a share. Some people will focus on the gender element of it because it’s easy and topical, but there’s more to offer than just that perspective, of course, at least for me. It’s nice to see more females in and around the space, but I think it’s a little bit low hanging to only focus on that as a fact. I hope that people look beyond just the gender to actually see what I’m saying.”
“If what I’m creating is inspiring to others to want to join, then that is inspiring to me back”
Poppy’s been equally resistant to falling in with the zeitgeist, happily leaving it to exist and evolve while she chases her own creative inspiration. As her ascent has accelerated, questions might arise as to whether she is now becoming the zeitgeist.
“I haven’t really found my place,” she admits. “That’s how I feel. I have songs about that. To me, if I’m looked at in such a way as belonging, that’s uncomfortable, because I don’t really feel like I came up in a particular scene, but maybe there’s some sort of an association there that I’m missing. I’ll take the good parts of that. But how it feels inside is... I’m an explorer, so wherever that leads me is where it leads me, but I don’t feel like I’ve fully arrived.
“The discomfort is comforting to me,” she continues. “The discontent fuels the exploration in all directions and wanting to learn more about things that interest me. Early on, when I was younger, I didn’t like a school setting because I was really bored with what they were talking about. Then when that was over, I got to do what I wanted all the time and learn about things that I actually cared about. It wasn’t that I hated school or learning – it was that I was bored by everything that they had to say. Now I get to choose what I want to take in and what I want to learn about. There’s a whole world out there.”
Poppy might be in a constant state of motion, but it doesn’t mean she’s rushing. Nor is her every experiment a one-and-done deal. Sometimes, her move from album to album is a stepping stone rather than a leap across a canyon to something drastically different – not that she’d ever regurgitate the same ideas. This is the case from Negative Spaces to Empty Hands, which draw from a similar well but with their own distinct identities.
The other point of overlap is the person behind the production desk, with Jordan Fish aboard for the second album on the bounce.
“I think one of the most important things is that we’re friends,” Poppy explains when asked what makes their creative partnership so fruitful. “In my experience working with people that I consider my friends, it’s more of a fluid relationship. There’s an honesty there, especially when it comes to spending a lot of time with somebody and working in close quarters in such a collaborative space. You have to trust them. I think surrounding yourself with people that you trust is how you get a better result.”
She’s wisened to this because she’s seen the other side of it. “Early on for me in my musical endeavours, I was writing with a bunch of different people from different bands and projects and producers, and that was more depleting than anything. It was an experience of learning how to work with other people, so it was good in that respect, but also, if you do too much of that, I believe, if you’re actually somebody who is quite quiet that you start to kind of lose your centre. I’m glad that those days are in the past and I can just work with people that I trust and value.”
But how does that process work? What roles do they assume? “I’m the boss!” she says, a hint of chirpiness in her usual calm, restrained tone. “A lot of the songs on this record were just Jordan and I, or started with Jordan and I before bringing other people on. The genesis of the idea was very close knit. He is manning the controls and I am usually in the back of the room by the microphone with my notebook and computer.”
“Surrounding yourself with people you trust is how you get a better result”
Poppy’s methods of ideating are tactile and analogue. She favours journalling, drawing and scrapbooking, pooling inspiration from photos and colours as she constructs her stories.
“Certain songs I will see as a collective of different colours, but not in a way that some people have synaesthesia,” she says. “I don’t know if that’s something more to it, just how I feel the song reflects a colour palette to me or the album.”
Without rhyme or reason, Empty Hands felt like a pastel blue album – it’s why it’s so prominent on the cover. It certainly suits the record’s tender moments, such as the courageous, loving sentiment of Guardian, a song whose melody couldn’t leave Poppy alone after she wrote it, to the point where she’d sing it in funny accents around the house. It seems a paradoxically soft shade for an album that often spikes to eye-widening levels of aggression. There’s the slamming Dying To Forget, on which she corrosively screams: ‘Rot in your piss in your shallow grave / I’ll watch your kingdom fall / I’ll cut the brakes so your car can’t stop,’ while the title-track’s lacerating heaviness shares some DNA with the sound of Knocked Loose.
Even when she applies a more melodic touch, her tone is at times more acerbic than she’s ever been. ‘You’re celibate but no-one wants to fuck,’ she sneers on the energetic blast of Eat The Hate, while on the eerily theatrical opener Public Domain, she slips into a mocking, robotic register to eviscerate materialistic people: ‘Can you bottle it? Will you sell it for food? Would you sleep with it? Tell me who’s using who.’ There’s nothing placid about the pastel blue on the cover – instead, it’s more like the colour of ice.
Poppy is visceral and cynical when it comes to the record’s primary theme of greed. “The sentiment of Empty Hands has a couple of layers to it, depending on how you take it in, or what it means to you,” she explains. “A few of them are obvious and a few of them are a little bit more coy. The message that is pertinent to me in relation to this is when there are a lot of people that are trying to grab and take, what is all of it for? Because when we leave, none of it is ours anyway – whether it’s money or recognition or anything superficial. Why are you being so greedy when it’s not coming with you into the afterlife?”
After all, when you remember greed is futile, the world becomes more absurd. The lust for power, status, achievements and material gains becomes unjustifiable, whether it’s a follower count ticking up or world leaders threatening wars over oil reserves. And, of course, social safety and agency can be bought – but not happiness.
“Everything means nothing and nothing means everything,” Poppy muses. “You can have everything in the world and still be unhappy, or you can have nothing and be the most fulfilled.”
The last time we caught up with Poppy almost a year ago, she told us she was “always breaking free of my past self”. Time will pass, she will close the book on an album and not open it again. “The artists that I admire the most seem to be the ones that think of music in a way that’s like a documentation of a lived moment in time or an experience, and also understand that that moment will never happen again,” she says. She doesn’t even buy the same perfume twice, a habit shared with Andy Warhol. “It almost teleports you back. There are certain songs that I don’t like to listen to again because they’re too tied to something that I didn’t like or a negative experience. It’s a bit of a psychological game to disassociate from what the meaning of it is in order to play songs sometimes.”
This relates to Empty Hands because it was formed out of the desire for Poppy wanting to take something forward: bristling, raw live energy. This was what she got to rediscover on the cycle for Negative Spaces, having left behind the high-fidelity gloss of 2023’s divisive dark pop LP Zig. It’s an album that served a purpose, fulfilling her desire to re-engage with her dance background, but it’s telling that less than half of its tracklist was ever played live and none of those songs have made her setlist in almost two years.
“Zig was unimportant,” Poppy declares. “It was a step within a step. A lot of the behind the scenes that went on during and before that album made me disenchanted with it by the time it came out, and it’s fine if it dies. There was a lot of switching of labels and dealing with people and their opinions that I don’t like to hear. People can just skip Zig – it’s out for people to listen to, but I have no fulfilment in that album.”
It doesn’t come as much as a surprise, then, when the subject of 2026 marking a decade of her life spent in music comes up, and Poppy reveals she hadn’t been thinking about it.
“I was unaware of that as a fact, until right now,” she admits. “I’m looking ahead, and in relation to that fact, it’s pretty neat that I’m able to keep doing this thing that I enjoy most days. And it’s never a straight road, it’s always winding and it’s a chosen experience, but it’s better than being bored.”
That winding road is taking Poppy back around the world again. By the time you read this, she’ll be deep into rehearsals for her next tour, stopping first in Australia and later across the UK and Europe in March, including her largest British date so far at London’s Roundhouse which has already sold out. It’s also the first time she’s done a complete headline run of the UK and Europe, having previously only done one or the other in segments (with another planned run becoming one of the first touring casualties of the pandemic).
“At a Poppy show, a lot of the attendees are very diverse,” she notes. “At least for me, I would say over the years, I think it’s become known that I have some of the most colourful and diverse audiences, and I love that. I love to take photos and have my photographer go out and walk in the line and take photos of the outfits, and that gets me excited before I play, to just see who is out there. It seems like the kind of event that people can leave whatever their realities were prior to showing up at the door and together, for that moment of escape.”
In truth, in the coming 12 months, Poppy already knows getting exactly what she wants. And when the question comes around of what she hopes 2026 will bring, she comes full-circle.
“Just more adventures. That’s all.”
Empty Hands is due out on January 23 via Sumerian Records. Get your Poppy x Kerrang! limited edition 20 page zine.
Read this next:
- Poppy: “Every day I wake up, I want to push myself to do something that I haven’t done the day before”
- Poppy: “I want to get closer to understanding myself. I think that’s my only responsibility”
- Poppy: “People are always trying to get ahead as opposed to living, it takes a lot of work to fight to be in the present”
