The Renaissance woman of 2017: YouTube shitposter, musician of sorts, recorder of sleep albums this side of the Dude — oh, and harbinger of CONTROVERSY…

[Video]
[3.42]

Will Adams: Poppy has been living a double life for years, simultaneously being the face of a fake-deep internet art project about celebrity culture as dismantled by a Shining twin ghostchild as well as being a backburner project for a major label churning out bland pop and making the promo circuit. Only recently have the persona and music begun to merge, but ironing out the dissonance doesn’t make the social commentary any less shallow, the music any more compelling, nor the sub-Black Mirror weird-for-weird’s-sake aesthetic any less irritating. “Computer Boy” takes an already familiar premise, pulling inspiration from way better sources — including Sky Ferreira (digitized electropop grind), Robyn (robot-as-human-and-or-sex-object), and the Vengaboys (lol sex jokes) — and doing absolutely nothing innovative with it. The song thinks it has a lot to say, but there’s as much content as you’d get from hearing Poppy repeat her name for ten minutes.
[2]

Micha Cavaseno: Sky Ferreira’s “One” rewritten to transpose the robotization onto someone’s fantasy boyfriend (complete with dick jokes! Naturally, it appears to be tied into some PC Music-esque satirical art project, which is less interesting the more you suss out the cynicism that’s pretty obvious from jump. Shame that more attempts to poke fun aren’t being done from within rather than from snotty outsiders.
[6]

Alfred Soto: “I’m so in love with my man of the future,” she sings over bleeps from an Atari 2600 game. Also, they sing about floppy disks entering hard drives, ho ho. Its concision and sense of play — I relish Poppy’s experimenting with voices — put much of it over anyway.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: The lyrics are moronic, and the music sounds like someone took an old Commodore 64 and just hit all the keys. I suppose it’s meant to be “wry” or “knowing” or “ironic,” but it’s really just stupid.
[0]

Scott Mildenhall: The thing is, the Vengaboys were selling awful computer-based innuendoes to children for real seventeen years ago. This will never be as weird as the bona fide chart music of that era, so if that was the point… well, who knows what the point is? In any case it’s not lacking for purpose: the choruses are the repeatedly welcome peaks of a committed driving force throughout it. Whatever the intent, there’s a vitality.
[7]

Stephen Eisermann: I went from listening to the NoSleep Podcast (a horror story podcast, for those unaware) to this song, and I’m still unconvinced that I am not now the protagonist of one of those short stories.
[0]

Claire Biddles: So, an Internet superstar singing about wanting to fuck a laptop over a tinny amalgamation of all the streaming trends of the past 6 months — we’re truly through the PC Music looking-glass now. I know that’s the point, this infinity-removed post-ironic distance from feeling and authenticity, but it’s just so boring now, isn’t it? Call me old-fashioned, but critiques of internet fame and pop trends are only interesting when the rot and horror and desperation can be seen through the gossamer-thin avatar.
[0]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Poppy’s schtick fails to deliver on multiple fronts. It lacks the authenticity of other odd projects, music-related or not. Even @horse_ebooks offered the occasional bit of post-modern poeticism. What’s most disappointing about her music is that it isn’t even off-putting. I’d expect more brand commitment from someone with numerous videos featuring expressionless phrases and Badalamenti-inspired ambience. Ditto for mastermind Titanic Sinclair and his other projects.
[3]

Kalani Leblanc: Poppy can’t dodge PC Music comparisons — even though she imitates current obsessions, while PC artists like Hannah Diamond adopt what the early 2000s thought the future would look like. I just wish Poppy would push harder to get what the PC troupe does especially well — composing twisted pop — instead of selling short with a condensed version of a Disney sitcom theme. 
[6]

Austin Brown: I, for one, am overjoyed we’ve stripped back the accelerationist pretense from PC Music-adjacent pop and admitted that it’s basically Hatsune Miku slash fic, but if only this sounded as in on that joke as the lyrics.
[3]

Iain Mew: Making floppy disk jokes in 2017 is hopeless — so far beyond outdated it could almost be enjoyably strange, if it weren’t stuck next to a cut-and-paste assembly of laptop and attachment references and “make me come… alive.” The lazy thunk of the words is even more annoying when the music is so much more thoughtful and wide-ranging, from the strutting neon chorus to the menu of beeps that give each bit of the track its own retro flavour, and hang together as something new and not just “here’s something familiar, will this do?”
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Mad Decent wants some of their very own PC Music: predictable. Said PC music being delivered by a Vine-era Ana Voog in millennial pink: also predictable. Except where the original label sounds like MIDIs of rave synths, Poppy sounds like the tinkertoy pop machines of Sugababes’ “Push the Button,” Robyn’s “Fembot” or Sky Ferreira’s “One”: an improvement. But in a world that contains the suffering vocals and yearning, earnest erotics of “Deeper Understanding,” I don’t need snotty-voiced BBS gags about floppy disks and hard drives. (It isn’t 1993 anymore; in 2017 we upgrade thumb drives to solid state.) A cliché authenticity plea, sure. But it’s one her fans (who don’t seem astroturfed) seem to share given how diligently they scrounge around YouTube — like, literally going through strangers’ beauty haul videos — for Poppy’s old memory-holed pop music covers, which basically sound like acoustic Halsey. Now that’s satire.
[2]