Since the very beginning, there has been a darkness buried in Poppy’s heart. It’s there in the earliest videos uploaded to her mysterious YouTube channel back in 2014, in which the character—portrayed by an actress and musician named Moriah Pereira—performed simple tasks against a white background, occasionally delivering surrealist monologues. Her very first video featured her eating cotton candy in a way that might feel familiar to fans of ASMR videos: Her lips smack, her throat rumbles, she makes satisfied “ahhs,” but something’s off about the whole thing. Audio and image are out of sync; nothing sounds quite like you expect it to.

It was an unsettling beginning, and in the ensuing years, she’s only plunged further into uncomfortable territory. One of her early popular videos, for example, features her staring into the camera as she teaches the viewer how to load a handgun. In another, she makes explicit reference to one of 4chan’s most notoriously noxious message boards. Unlike a lot of people who have set about parodying the strangeness of influencer culture, she and her collaborators—chief among them the director and producer Titanic Sinclair—have seemed uniquely attuned to the surreal perversity that lurks in the shadowy underbelly of YouTube culture. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that some of the platform’s more unsavory figures have been outspoken fans of hers. She’s fluent in the lingua franca of the internet’s darkest parts.

The music attributed to Poppy over the years hasn’t always mirrored this side of her work. Her first album was a collection of wheezy ambient compositions self-consciously designed to “help facilitate a full night of sleep” and made, she says, with guidance from doctors who study sleep at Washington University. She’s made several albums’ worth of sugary bangers for Diplo’s Mad Decent label and a sci-fi synth soundtrack to a graphic novel. But her new album I Disagree is her first to fully follow through on the upsetting qualities of her video works, adding the grim aesthetics and curdled riffing of nu-metal, grindcore, and industrial noise to the seasick melange of her music.

The record’s opening track, “Concrete,” is typical of her approach here. After an air-raid siren, she whispers about wanting to be buried alive, covered in concrete and turned “into a street,” before launching into a series of proggy vignettes. There’s a section that sounds like the Body’s sludgy electro-metal, a paisley pop chorus that’d be at home on a Kinks record, and a series of gurgly riffs that’d rank among Slipknot’s grossest, all before culminating in what sounds like an arena crowd chanting her name, followed by a coda that sparkles like “Blank Space.” Like, say, 100 gecs or the recent Grimes singles, part of the joy in I Disagree comes in how overwhelming it is. No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise.

Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic. “Bloodmoney” castigates hypocrites and evil men who hide behind the banner of religion. “Don’t Go Outside” evokes the imagery of biblical plagues, with frogs falling from the sky. The title track explicitly welcomes the end of the world, assuring, “We’ll be safe and sound when it all burns down.” None of the situations she explores are especially specific, but it’s striking—as the world burns and nuclear war once more feels like a distinct possibility—to hear a reminder that chaos can be cleansing, that calamity is the first step to starting all over again and building something new.