Poppy’s Rockville Set Cut Off After a Minute as Severe Weather Halts the Festival

Poppy barely got through the opening minute of her Welcome To Rockville set before severe weather protocols shut everything down on Friday evening in Daytona Beach, Florida. The performance was stopped mid-song as lightning warnings moved across Volusia County and the festival cleared the site for safety.

The annual rock and metal festival is spread across Thursday to Sunday, May 7 to 10, at Daytona International Speedway, with Guns N’ Roses, Foo Fighters, My Chemical Romance, Bring Me The Horizon, Turnstile and The Offspring occupying the top of the bill. Poppy was due on Friday, but her appearance was interrupted almost immediately when the weather system forced organisers to halt the show entirely.

Warnings appeared on screens around the festival grounds as the thunderstorm rolled in, sending crowds either back to their campsites and cars or into the grandstands while the storm passed. The shutdown did not last for the rest of the day. Once the danger eased, the Friday programme resumed and Foo Fighters eventually took the festival’s main stage.

For Poppy, the stop-start nature of the set arrived at a moment when her current run has been closely tied to a new phase in her recording output. She released her seventh studio album, Empty Hands, in January, just a year after Negative Spaces. Both records were made with producer Jordan Fish, formerly of Bring Me The Horizon, and songwriter Stephen Harrison of House Of Protection.

Speaking to NME ahead of Empty Hands, Poppy said working with Fish again felt like “the right choice”. “There’s a really nice point of consistency where you no longer have to explain yourself or your reasoning, and it’s understood and accepted,” she said. She also described the difference between Negative Spaces and Empty Hands as “very evident”, adding, “When the others hear it and decide to call it a genre or put their goo on it, that’s up to them. I know where the line is drawn. To articulate that gives a bit of a disservice to it, because it muddies the presentation.”

In March, she also linked up with Son Lux’s Ryan Lott on In Death We’ve Just Begun, the anthem for the Marathon.