That Poppy Knows Exactly What She’s Doing

Boredom and Vevo are a dangerous combination. I’d been scrolling through one hollow clip after another—the audiovisual equivalent of eating cardboard—when That Poppy appeared with Lowlife. The video is a mess: cheaply shot, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu aesthetics without any of Kyary’s budget or conviction, a grotesquely made-up devil, some old man in a wheelchair whose presence I still can’t explain. I should have clicked away inside five seconds.

I didn’t click away. The melody had already gotten in through a window I’d left open. Then the chorus arrived—Baby you’re the highlight of my lowlife—and that reggae beat landed with a casualness that felt almost like a threat, like it knew I was gone before I was.

The construction of That Poppy as a persona is deliberate and a little unsettling. She performs at some indeterminate age—could be sixteen, could be twenty-six—with the same flat expression across all of it, a face that says sure, fine, whatever while the whole production insists on candy colors and anime-adjacent charm. No press release mentions her actual age. The ambiguity is the point. She’s assembled from pieces of J-pop, YouTube-era weirdness, and something that hasn’t quite been named yet, and Lowlife is the purest version of it: a song that sounds disposable right up until it becomes unavoidable.

Baby you’re the highlight of my lowlife. I’ve been humming it since.