“It’s about Poppy,” Poppy tells me by phone from LA. Next month, meanwhile, a television show written and directed by Sinclair will premiere in the Indie Episodic category of the Sundance film festival. She will play her first-ever UK show in London on Wednesday (at the Garage in Highbury), with more North American dates added to the end of February she’ll record her second album in Japan in the coming weeks. Poppy released her debut album, Poppy.Computer, on Diplo’s Mad Decent label in October, and has been touring the US and Canada since. She is the sort of celebrity who could not have existed even half a decade ago: born of and beloved by the internet, and essentially unknown outside of it. She is a pop singer, soon to be the star of her own TV show. But Poppy is a character portrayed by the musician Moriah Poppy, born Moriah Pereira, created with the director Titanic Sinclair, born Corey Mixter, both of Los Angeles. Poppy says Poppy is an alien, an object, a computer, your pet. “I am not in a cult.” Then she bows: 2.1m views. “Say it with me: ‘I am not in a cult,’” she says. In one of her higher-concept clips, she kneels in prayer before a metallic P.

In another, she wonders aloud why Selena Gomez has so many social media followers: 2.6m views. In the first video of Poppy ever posted, in November 2014, she wordlessly consumes candy floss: this has had 2.3m views. Her videos are the sort you stumble upon while following links blindly down an online rabbit hole: portals to a pastel-washed parallel universe populated by platinum-blond Poppy and her fellow characters – a basil plant and a mannequin called Charlotte. Poppy has about 300 videos on her channel, which have received a combined 235m views, increasing by 250,000 a day YouTube says her subscribers have grown 260% in the past year. This has been viewed more than 12.6m times. In one of her hundreds of videos on YouTube, she repeats those two words in her childlike monotone for 10 minutes.

Yuo tube little red prayer book