Review Summary: Negative Spaces B-Sides
Poppy’s last album, Negative Spaces, was hands down the best thing she’s released to date. It was sharp, diverse, heavy, catchy, and felt like the culmination of everything Poppy had done to that point. It also kicked off a wave of mainstream attention, helped along even more by her collaboration with Amy Lee last year. And now we have Empty Hands, another collaboration with producer Jordan Fish — known for sculpting that ultra-polished, radio-ready, arena-metal sheen during his time in Bring Me The Horizon. So expectations should have been high.
But let’s just rip the plaster off: Empty Hands sounds very similar to Negative Spaces to the point where most tracks feel like B-Sides. The aesthetic is still pop-metal with industrial sprinkles, Poppy's vocals still bounce between whisper-soft and flesh-tearingly heavy, and the overall vibe is still glossy, digitized heaviness.
Instrumentally, almost everything here is painfully bland, beige, and generic. The guitars are all AI slop ass generic riffs. The heavy sections largely sound the same across the record. A lot of these riffs could be swapped between songs and nothing would change. So while sonically this is very similar to Negative Spaces, its actually the song-writing which has had the biggest fall off. Where Negative Spaces had variety—heavy tracks, hooky tracks, tracks leaning into electronica or industrial influences—Empty Hands feels like the pared-down, radio edit version of that album. A collection of pop-metal tracks that exist to be added to Spotify playlists
Tracks like
'Bruised Sky' and
'Guardian' are so milquetoast. And yes, there are influences of nu-metal and industrial but none of these influences get fleshed out beyond the most rudimentary, surface-level aspects. There’s a couple tracks with some vague grunge influence but these still come off quite derivative, like
'Eat The Hate' which sounds like a c-tier Nirvana track instrumentally, or
'If We’re Following the Light', which has riffs plucked straight off Garage Band.
I feel like we need to talk about Jordan Fish’s production style and the increasing Fish-ification of the mainstream metal scene. Jordan Fish brings his usual ultra-clean, ultra-compressed, ultra-accessible production style. This worked really well on Negative Spaces as that intersection of metal and pop is Poppy's MO. But a second album with the exact same sound design has become stale very quickly, not to mention making many aspects of this feel less unique and more interchangeable with the likes of Bring Me The Horizon, Bad Omens, Spiritbox, Sleep Token, etc
There are moments that spark something more promising.
'Dying To Forget' is the first honest-to-goodness heavy track, but which arrives halfway through the album. Gnarled riffs, Poppy’s screams actually really going for it, some tempo changes and some faster paced drums that make the chorus hit harder. It’s deffo one of the most exciting tracks even if it is giving 'token heavy track' energy.
'Ribs' has these dreamy synth and breakbeat sections that makes me interested in her leaning into a more hyperpop-adjacent project. It’s the one moment on the album that feels like a genuine new idea.And the closer goes full-on heavy, and instrumentally has the most going on with creepy synths, angular riffs, a more frantic energy, breakdowns, on top which Poppy is really shredding her vocal chords—including - I swear - a Brutal Death Metal snarl at the end. It’s the most surprising moment of the album and a shame its literally the last thing you hear.
Altogether, Empty Hands feels rushed out. Like it was pushed out quickly to ride the wave of attention from Negative Spaces and the Amy Lee collab without the same amount of thought and energy which went into that last album. Instead what we have is a collection of radio friendly pop metal tracks which, rather than evolving her sound, just replicate it —less creatively, less ambitiously, and with far less variety. Add more tracks to the spotify playlist count algorithms.
Full video review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW_ZePIClOw
