Savannah Pope creates a chamber pop masterpiece with “Panopticon”
With Savannah Pope’s “Panopticon,” the Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, and visual artist uses that theatricality to expose something deeply personal. The LA based artist details her trauma in a cinematic music and art universe, one that is elaborate and unsettling, where beauty and discomfort exist side by side.
Inspired by her own experiences with body image and sexual trauma, “Panopticon” explores the strange psychological afterlife of formative experiences, the feeling that even when the person who once judged, controlled, or wounded you is gone, their gaze somehow remains. You can leave the room, but the room doesn’t necessarily leave you. Pope captures that sensation with music that feels simultaneously enormous and claustrophobic.
Sonically, “Panopticon” occupies a fascinating space between baroque pop, art rock, opera, and cabaret. Sweeping orchestration gives the track an almost cinematic scale, while its theatrical flourishes recall the grandeur of Florence + the Machine and the darker, more decadent sensibilities of The Last Dinner Party. Yet Pope’s commanding and enticing voice gives the song its own identity. There is drama in her delivery and the grandeur becomes a vehicle for vulnerability.
That contrast is ultimately what makes “Panopticon” so compelling. The music is lush, dramatic, and deliberately extravagant, while the emotional center is exposed and painful. Pope understands that trauma rarely exists as a single clean narrative. It can become a collection of voices, memories, expectations, and internalized judgments that continue speaking long after the original experience has ended.
The accompanying music video expands that idea into an equally ambitious visual language. Drawing from Rococo painting, chiaroscuro, fashion editorials, dressing-room mirrors, and Pope’s delightfully irreverent concept of “Rococo drag,” the film turns the act of being observed into something surreal. The imagery is decadent without being purely glamorous, frequently allowing humor to puncture the darkness.
Most striking is the measuring-tape sequence, which transforms a familiar dressing-room ritual into something almost grotesque. What might ordinarily represent tailoring, fashion, or self-presentation becomes a visual examination of how bodies are scrutinized, categorized, and constructed. The body becomes both the subject and the object of the gaze.
That tension between spectacle and severity runs through the entirety of “Panopticon.” Pope isn’t interested in making trauma aesthetically palatable. Instead, she builds an ornate world around it, allowing excess, absurdity, theatricality, and vulnerability to coexist. The result feels less like a conventional music video and more like a short performance-art film.
“Panopticon” also offers an intriguing preview of Pope’s forthcoming EP, which promises to move through operatic rock grandeur, baroque pop drama, and stripped-down cabaret intimacy. If this track is any indication, the project won’t simply be a collection of songs; it will be an immersive universe where music, fashion, theater, and visual art inform one another.
With her new single and music video, Savannah Pope turns the experience of being watched into an act of reclamation. She takes the gaze that once represented judgment and control and transforms it into something she can manipulate, exaggerate, satirize, and ultimately own. It is beautiful, unsettling, theatrical, and deeply vulnerable, a striking introduction to an artist who clearly has no interest in coloring inside the lines.