Poppy

Based in: Los Angeles, California

Active: 2015–present

I first heard of her: from a post that compared her music to that of Jack Off Jill

Sound: I initially said that “Jack Off Jill is not the first comparison I’d make,” but now that she has covered Jack Off Jill’s “Fear of Dying”, I guess Poppy herself disagrees.  But bizarre as it might seem, I’m inclined to draw a comparison to Sparks!  She started out with a public persona that was largely a performance (à la Ron Mael), and much of her early output had a satirical bent.  But even more Sparksy has been her genre-hopping: in her short career Poppy has careened from punk to ska to 8-bit to dance-pop to electronica to shoegaze to glitch-pop to metal, and I’ve left out some genres for the sake of brevity.

Further listening: As of 2025, Poppy has ten songs in my top twenty and eighteen in my top one hundred.  That means that the following list features, at best, my nineteenth-favorite song of hers.  I’m also skipping some extraordinarily good songs in order to cover more eras of her career. And yet this short compilation tops nearly every other artist’s complete oeuvre, if’n you ask me.  Working backwards…

“The Cost of Giving Up” (2024)
“V.A.N.” (2024)
“Zig” (2023)
“The Cutting Edge” (leaked 2023)
“Stagger” (2022)
“FYB” (2022)
“Flux” (2021)
“Never Find My Place” (2021)
“Sit / Stay” (2020)
“Meat” (2019)
“Choke” (2019)
“Heavy Metal” (leaked 2019)