Poppy at the Fillmore Minneapolis (July 22, 2026)

Poppy‘s show comes with two towering Jumbotron fortresses on either side of the stage, one of them with a drum kit on top. Before the openers got going at the Fillmore Minneapolis, those LED screens offered a QR code that invited us into “Poppy’s world”, but once the music began, the screens skipped “information” for “abstraction”. Geometric shapes, slow-motion water, nothing you needed to parse. It was atmosphere, not exposition, and it worked better for it. 

Her band wore serial-killer skin masks, including a guitarist in fishnets and pigtails. At one point Poppy picked up a similar mask and considered it / serenaded it, putting it down again without putting it on. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to. 

Musically, Poppy’s opening pair, “have you had enough?” and “the cost of giving up”, lean on the same trick: sweet balladry with a devastating drop. It works, and the crowd felt it, but back-to-back it felt like one move done twice. “Concrete” was way more representative of the Poppy I most enjoy: its Beach-Boys-Surf’s-Up-inspired (OK, Mr.-Bungle-California-inspired) bridge giving way to a thrash break that had the moshing crowd trying to keep up with its schizophrenic turns. “Scary Mask” kept the pretty-then-punishing formula going before Poppy grabbed a white acoustic guitar for a stretch of songs from 2024’s Negative Spaces and this year’s (very good) Empty Hands. Things got brutal again by the end, with the crowd near me particularly pumped for her band’s version of “V.A.N.” (originally a collab with Bad Omens). 

The openers ran opposite directions: Thousand Below sounded enormous, but their studio perfection and politeness undercut whatever menace the Poppy brand promises. LANDMVRKS won me over, mixing French rap with English screaming, and explaining that they’d come a long way to be here. It’s always a little more charming when an internationally traveling band says “thank you for being here” — doubly so when they end with “merci beaucoup“. 

The Fillmore crowd skewed young, but I’m not sure how many of them were taking advantage of the show’s generous and rare “15+” age limit. They were heavy on Gojira and Underoath shirts and fishnets. A guy in a Deadpool-meets-spiked-metal-mohawk getup was unmistakeable both times he crowd-surfed, and the mosh pit even had a guy in a banana suit. One detail I’d never noticed: the temporary mosh pit lost-and-found, where dropped phones, watches, and necklaces are held aloft, nearby phone flashlights aimed at them until they’re reclaimed. 

Poppy’s stage is worth seeing all its own, but her lethal-but-winking-but-still-pretty-dangerous stage presence is can’t-miss.