Fantasy, Brutality, and Baroque Pop: Inside Savannah Pope’s “Panopticon”

Savannah Pope produces music where rock collides with cinematic pop, glam, cabaret, and performance art. Based in Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter and visual artist has become known for an opera-like voice that can turn a single line into a scene, and for visuals that feel less like “music content” and more like living installations: ornate, confrontational, and impossible to look away from.

That sense of scale has already carried Pope onto some serious stages. She supported Andy Bell of Erasure across North America, and brought her own universe to Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre for three sold-out nights—proof that her audience isn’t just listening, they’re showing up. On the opposite coast, she nearly sold 100 tickets for her New York headline debut at Joe’s Pub, a milestone that signals what her work has been quietly doing for a while now: expanding beyond the underground into something bigger, bolder, and harder to categorise.

Pope’s forthcoming EP is positioned as a kind of emotional fever dream—one that moves between operatic rock grandeur, baroque pop drama, and stripped-down cabaret intimacy. At its core are themes that don’t ask for easy consumption: trauma, desire, identity, and the long, complicated work of self-reclamation. It’s music that understands how glamour can be armour, how beauty can be a weapon, and how performance can be both escape and exposure.

Her latest single, “Panopticon,” is a striking example of that tension. The track examines the lingering power certain people can hold over us long after a formative experience has ended—the way a gaze can outlive the person behind it, becoming a phantom presence that still measures, judges, and narrates your body back to you. Written from Pope’s own history with body image and sexual trauma, “Panopticon” captures the disorienting sensation of being watched by ghosts: not supernatural ones, but the internalised echoes of scrutiny that refuse to leave.

Sonically, Pope pulls from movie scores and opera, channeling the modern theatricality of artists like Florence + the Machine and The Last Dinner Party. Sweeping orchestration, baroque drama, and cabaret intimacy keep pressing against the song’s exposed centre, creating something that feels grand and beautiful while still holding the raw honesty of the lyrics. It’s the kind of track that doesn’t just build to a climax—it circles you, tightening its grip, until you realise you’ve been holding your breath.

The accompanying video is equally deliberate: a piece of art in its own right, steeped in Rococo painting, chiaroscuro, fashion editorials, and dressing-room mirrors. Pope describes the aesthetic as “Rococo drag,” and it’s an apt phrase—playful and decadent on the surface, but sharp-edged underneath. Fantasy and brutality share the same frame, and the film seems to understand that the most seductive images can also be the most violent.

One of the video’s most striking moments is a measuring-tape sequence that turns the familiar scrutiny of the dressing room into something surreal—an examination of how bodies are observed, constructed, and controlled. It’s lush, severe, beautiful, and unexpectedly funny, a tonal twist that feels intentional rather than distracting: a reminder that sometimes humour is the only way to survive what shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

“Panopticon” is part of Pope’s forthcoming EP, and if this single is any indication, the project won’t be a simple collection of songs—it will be a statement.