Poppy’s sixth studio album, known as “Negative Spaces,” is a very complex body of work that explores a multitude of different music styles and ideas. The album blends pop, rock and metal together to tell its story and move you along with it. These genres are drastically different, and being able to integrate them into a single song is impressive, let alone a whole album from start to finish.
The major themes of this album consist of the passage of time, depression, love, self-preservation and suicide contemplation. It’s a very mixed pool of elements to work with, so it requires a lot of precise lyrics and instrumentals to convey these messages. The opening track starts very heavy and loud, titled “have you had enough?” Personally, this is my favorite song released with this record; it excellently showcases her lower vocal register and her screaming abilities perfectly while discussing her feelings. This song explores the idea of feeling trapped in the cycle of living, surrounded by evil and feeling stuck in a form of purgatory.
This transitions into tracks two and three, known as “the cost of giving up” and “they’re all around us.” The name for track two is mostly self-explanatory, questioning what the cost of giving up is when you feel rotten and withered inside yourself. This really piqued my interest, specifically the line “maybe I’m the one I’m running from,” because it gives so much more depth to a song that sounds relatively simple on paper. The ending of this track is mostly metal, with the vocals predominantly being screaming, in order to transition into the third song, which consists of screams from start to finish.
“They’re all around us” is a manifestation of feeling surrounded by opposition and lacking the ability to trust anyone, out of a combination of fear and anger. This doesn’t really add up to much until the sixth track, “vital.” This song tells the story of a toxic relationship, considering if staying in the same cruel cycle of living is really worse than being on your own. The song’s name represents the feeling of someone being vital to you despite them hurting you and consistently pushing you down, as you continue to grow attached to them and feel unable to be without them. This is also the first song on the album that consists of no screams or metal elements, which showcases the versatility of Poppy as an artist.
These ideas carry over to track eight, “nothing,” with the chorus further expressing her guilt and anger toward this aggressive partner. The repeated lines of “What do you want from me when nothing’s enough for you” have the first half sung and the second half as a scream to express the duality of the emotions heartbreak can make you feel. The idea of being so depressed but also enraged simultaneously is a concept I really enjoy in music when it’s executed well, which is why I love this track so much.
The last third of this album is mostly joining together the themes and elements explored in the previous tracks, with more explicit and blatant lyricism. The 11th song is the title track, sharing the same name as the album itself – “negative spaces” is simply about bliss through ignorance and pretending that pain isn’t really there if you convince yourself to feel that way. Feeling overwhelmed after undergoing all of this pain leaves no real positive solution, which leads to the desire to enter a negative space, or the afterlife.
Track 13th, “new way out,” was the first single released for this record, many months before the full album itself. Looking for a new way out translates to taking your own life and finding your own way through the struggle of living. This is mostly a full-circle moment because, despite being the first song released, it’s the second to last on the record and one of the last components of the story. The second track had pretty much an identical message, only now the love and heartbreak have already occurred, and these suicidal thoughts have risen again. This song has every genre on the record in one, summing all of the messages up in a neat three-minute window.
Singing the praises of this body of work was so easy because it is so complex and diverse, with a lot of this knowledge not being surface-level and instead of having to be pieced together. I believe versatility is the best trait you can have in the music industry, and Poppy executes every genre on this record flawlessly from start to finish. Overall, I consider this record to be a 10/10 easily and one of my favorite albums ever released.
