FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Brent McKeever
and original artists in music right now, I am excited by PinkPantheress’ music. There is an air of nostalgia to it, yet it is distinctly fresh and forward-looking. I will come to a review of her extraordinary mixtape, to hell with it, in a minute. There is a lot to uncover and reveal when it comes to the British wonder. Although there are aspects of her personal life that she keeps private, her interviews do give one an insight into the music and creative process. The first interview I want to bring in is from The Guardian. Earlier this month they spotlighted an incredible young artist who is still balancing academic commitments with music:
“In December, a TikTok user in London named PinkPantheress started uploading clips of a song, intending to keep at it until “someone notices”. Ten months later, the social media platform named her song Just for Me its breakout track of the summer; it has more than 20m plays on Spotify and, after being sampled by the drill rapper Central Cee, went into the UK Top Five.
A flood of similarly fleeting tracks have followed: rarely lasting more than two minutes, they are mostly self-produced, lo-fi mash-ups of saccharine-sweet vocals and jungle and drum’n’bass beats. Gen Z adores her; Grimes and Charli XCX are fans; Lizzo and Charli d’Amelio, TikTok’s reigning queen, have used her music to soundtrack their own TikToks.
Her relative anonymity has accentuated the interest. She had more or less hidden her face on TikTok until recently. As we meet on a video call for one of her first on-camera interviews, her publicist sternly instructs me not to reveal her name. It is about convenience, says the 20-year-old film student.
“At the end of the day, I am still at uni and I enjoy my life outside of doing interviews,” she says. I expect her to be shy, but she is the opposite: self-deprecating and funny, shooting back thoughtful, intelligent answers deadpan. She clearly recognises her growing stardom, but isn’t flustered by it. “I am just an internet kid at the end of the day – always have been and always will be,” she says.
This week, she releases her debut mixtape, To Hell With It. Her first for the major label Parlophone, it features self-produced tracks alongside collaborations with Mura Masa. Her bubbly, high-spirited productions disguise melancholy lyrics (“We split in two, now you don’t want me,” she laments on Noticed I Cried). They are not inspired by her life, but rather tales of troubled teens in Jacqueline Wilson novels and TV shows such as Waterloo Road.
Born in Bath in 2000, PinkPantheress moved to Kent at five with her mother, a carer of Kenyan heritage, and her English father, an academic now based in the US. She fronted a band in her early teens, covering My Chemical Romance songs and taking inspiration from Paramore’s Hayley Williams; they made their debut performance at a school fete. “I had jeggings on and cut a hole in the knee to look more emo,” she says. “I’m a really nervous performer now, but I remember not caring about who was watching and how many people. I left the stage thinking I killed it, even though I was super off-key. I was too young to be nervous. Hopefully, I’ll get back to that point.”
In her later teenage years, she created songs on GarageBand, singing over sped-up old-school jungle and garage beats she found via YouTube and friends from the DJing and skateboarding scenes. She wanted to make music professionally, but found little success posting her music on SoundCloud, so she moved to London, where she is now based, to study film as a backup. “I thought every artist was an industry plant or something,” she says. “These people weren’t ever like me, not just a student or normal person. I was a bit naive, I think.”
She migrated to TikTok because of the platform’s openness to throwaway, imperfect content – and quickly went viral. “It took me until I was 19 to realise that there was a way of getting into music without having loads of industry connections,” she says. “If XXXTentacion can use SoundCloud and do it that way, then I feel like I can, too”.
Apologies for messing with chronology a bit in terms of interviews! There are a lot of great pieces that give us new information about PinkPantheress. This NME feature and interview from last month asks, among other things, why there used to be a sense of anonymity to PinkPantheress:
“For a good amount of time, you kept your identity hidden. Why?
“I think it’s down to how much you put out there. I wanted this to be more about the music than how I presented myself. It’s about how much you can control, and you can’t control everything, but I’ve decided that I can sometimes be incognito. It’s nice that people are interested, but also feel like, ‘Well, I can only give them what I want to give them’. I love the privacy I have as of right now.”
Did you think you’d ever be in this position?
“I’ve wanted to be an artist my whole life, but I kind of suppressed it because I thought that the chances of it actually happening were slim to none, and it also wasn’t really in keeping with what I was doing at the time. It’s been something that I have wanted to do since I was 10. When I was in school, I was leaning more towards a career in film. I’m still at university to do film – and I’m not planning to drop out. I’m going to stay here as long as I can, yet I do feel like film is a closed book for me. But it’s not fully closed because I still love it and I want to direct videos.”
What was the moment in which you wanted to become PinkPantheress?
“I’d say it was when I saw Paramore live at Reading Festival when I was younger, and I saw Hayley Williams on stage. She was doing something that I wanted to do, so I thought I’d better start manifesting early so I can get there.
“Performer-wise, Hayley Williams is a big influence; she’s amazing and one of my favourites in this game. I have never seen someone have so much fun on stage and look so effortless while doing it. I was so jealous of her”.
Where does your love for the garage and drum and bass samples you use come from?
“If you’d listen to my music and think, ‘No one’s done that before’, then it’s probably because of my melodies. Typically the people who sample garage are rappers, which is super cool; artists take modern songs and make them garage hits, like AJ Tracey’s ‘Ladbroke Grove’. I’m a big fan of that.
“For me, what I want to do – because I’m super lazy – is to take a garage beat that I really, really like and chop it down a bit, make a loop out of it, and then sing on top of it. There’s no one in the UK that doesn’t like garage, so it’s that with a twist”.
The penultimate interview I want to bring in is from NRP. Apart from the great sonic innovation and memorability of PinkPantheress’ music, her tracks are quite short and to the point:
“Do you ever think about your music through the lens of K-pop?
I do, actually. One thing about Korean music that really drew me to it in the first place was the topline writing, because the topline writing is a lot more intricate than Western pop. Some of the melodies, they're just way more interesting, in my opinion, as well as the instrumentals. One of my earliest tracks as PinkPantheress was an instrumental from a K-pop group called EXID. I sample Korean rappers and I think it's just a great genre of music, if you can call it a genre. I mean, it's not really a genre. It's a great community.
"Pain" was your first song to really take off. What do you remember about recording that song?
When I posted "Pain" I was doing one song a day. I was really sure what I wanted to achieve through TikTok and it was obviously to get a bigger audience. I was like, I'm just going to try and do this as quick as I can, because I'm really impatient with everything. I kind of resorted to doing one song a day in order to speed up the process, which sounds bad. It sounds like I was fully rushing it, but it was also a challenge for myself. I was taking like an hour a day when I got back home from university to write a 20 second loop, which sounded like it could develop into something longer than 20 seconds. "Pain" just happened to be one of those.
You were talking about being impatient with how you make and release music. Does that partly explain your songs being on the short side?
That definitely comes into it. When it comes to my own personal writing, I get kind of tired of hearing the same melodies over and over. The way that a usual song is structured is you'd have two verses, two choruses, maybe a [post-chorus], then obviously a fade out. It feels awkward for me to write any more than I feel like I have to. That being said, I've never been opposed to writing longer than one minute. It's kind of like, I make a song and in my head, I'm like, this must be the three minute mark, and then somebody will tell me it's only come to like two minutes. [laughs]
I listen to the mixtape and it feels a lot longer than it actually is. I don't know why that is.
I try to jam pack my songs. I try and flesh out the song as much as I can given the short amount of time I've got. I'll sing the same melody once, then move to another melody, then another melody. It's like you're getting a few melodies in a minute. I don't blame people for being like, this could be a bit longer because this isn't developed enough. People just have different attention spans and sometimes it takes people longer to really immerse themselves in a song. And I think the only remedy for that when you're listening to me is just to replay it if you want, if you so wish.
Your music is often described as nostalgic. What do you think about the baggage of that word?
I think I get it. I don't personally really get that feeling when I listen to my stuff. I think I've actually kind of come up with a theory as to why a lot of people think it's nostalgic, and it's just because [of] the beats, because they're naturally from the 2000s. But I think the way that my melodies sit on the beat are probably the reason that people are like, "I've definitely heard this kind of thing before." It's like, nah, I think you're hearing a lot of things. You're hearing a lot of music that you used to listen to in one, at the same time. That's essentially why it feels nostalgic.
If you used to listen to Green Day when you were younger, I use some of the melodies that they use, because I use pop punk melodies. If you've heard the beat before and you feel like you've heard it somewhere, you probably have. Nostalgia for me is a positive word. I think it means that people feel more comfortable because it's like, I feel safe listening to music.
Are there any artists that you want to work with in the future?
Oh 100% I definitely want to work with Kaytranada. I literally bring him up honestly, every single interview because I'm just like, I love you. You are a genius.
How do you want fans to understand you after this mixtape?
The first and foremost thing is if you like breakbeats and you like DnB, you need to tap into the British classics. Get a vinyl, go onto YouTube, type in Shy FX, type in Adam F, type in Sunship. I think if there's one thing I want people to know about me, it's that my music only scratches the surface of what real DnB is. Please take the dive that you need to do if you enjoy it and properly. And don't worry about me. A lot of people worry about me and think I'm super sad all the time because all my lyrics are so sad. But...no. I'm happy. [laughs] I'm happy”.
The brief aspect of PinkPantheress’ songs is also raised in the Billboard interview from a week or so back. Among other things, she gives a shout-out to her supportive peers in the interview:
“Fans might be led to believe that the widely discussed brevity of her songs -- only three out of the 10 tracks on to hell with it extend past two minutes, with only one marginally over the 2:30-mark -- stems from the time constraint of TikTok videos, which were previously capped at 60 seconds, but, as of July 1, now have a three-minuted extended maximum.
"When I write a song, I kind of get bored very easily of the same melody over again, so I kind of just end up going, 'Yeah, I'm gonna end the song here.' And funny enough, when I'm ending the song, I'm like, 'This is like three minutes, right?'" she says with a laugh that in and of itself is noticeably clipped. "I'm surprised by how actually short it is myself, to be fair, because I'm not intending them necessarily to be that short."
Her peers certainly don't feel bored singing her melodies over and over again, as heard in Giveon's gut-wrenching ballad cover of "Just For Me" for BBC Radio 1xtra Live Lounge and in Central Cee's U.K. drill hit "Obsessed With You," which heavily samples the same song and went all the way to No. 4 on the U.K. Singles Chart (the original "Just For Me" peaked at No. 27).
"It's like being in school -- sounds really weird actually, I don't know why I'm using this analogy -- and I've got loads of classmates," she says of other artists' reactions to her music. "It's like Central Cee's like a year above and he's like, 'Wow, you're doing really good...' I think it makes me feel like a lot of things are actually truly achievable when it comes to music. I feel like before, even when I had 'Break It Off' and 'Pain' out, I still felt very distanced between myself and a lot of the musicians I look up to."
The school analogy PinkPantheress makes earlier about relating to other artists makes sense coming from a girl studying film at the University of the Arts London. But when asked if she's still attending, the singer-songwriter coyly replies, "I think so" with a chuckle. "I've yet to confirm that for sure”.
I am going to end with a review for her mixtape, to hell with it. Pitchfork were keen to have their say about an amazing release. There is no doubt that, with to hell with it, we have an incredibly promising artist in PinkPantheress. I wonder whether new success and attention means we will get to know more about the woman behind the moniker:
“But what sets PinkPantheress’ music firmly in the modern day is her voice, an ethereal, pixelated miasma that breaks from the earnest delivery of her British predecessors. Her pinched coos feel hyperreal, the edges of her syllables sharpened as if sung by a swooning voice-to-text machine. There are obvious comparisons to futuristic singers like Grimes and Poppy, but PinkPantheress’ strangely soothing vocals also recall the performative over-enunciation of “TikTok voice.” That intimate quality reflects the recording process for most of her early singles, which were tracked lying down in her college dorm room because she felt unable to sing standing up. The combination of retro samples and Clairo-esque bedroom pop delivery breaks the early-2000s spell: Sure, those songs were perhaps more “cringe,” but their vocals were overdubbed to the high heavens. PinkPantheress feels like she’s whispering in your ear.
While she’s clearly a passionate scholar of the early millennium, she also seems aware that this era of her career can only go so far. Most of her songs are maddeningly fleeting, as if a longer look would reveal cracks in the facade. But PinkPantheress is beginning to push beyond genre tropes; though to hell with it is essentially a collection of previously released singles, the tape’s new songs hint at broader palettes and bigger risks. Where earlier lyrics were almost all outward projections onto an anonymous crush, “Reason” and “Nineteen” reflect on her own life. The latter, with its crashing waves and drawn-out violins, is the closest the record gets to a ballad. “I wasn’t meant to be/This bored at 19,” she confesses, a grounding moment on an album saturated with post-party depression.
It’s a slow and sensual track underscored by a low bassline, and unlike the rest, it builds without cutting to a breakbeat drop. It still doesn’t exceed the maximum allotted time for a TikTok, but it’s constructed for private sentimentality, not internet virality.
PinkPantheress succeeds where cheaper imitations fail because her reference points feel lived-in rather than opportunistic. She adds an undeniably contemporary spin on her trove of samples, imbuing them with the intimacy and immediacy that comes from a childhood spent on self-confessional platforms like Tumblr and TikTok. On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present”.
I shall leave it there. There is going to be a lot more great music from PinkPantheress. So far, we have this selection of amazing music that stands out from everything around it. On the strength of what she has produced so far, our very own PinkPantheress has…
A huge future ahead.
_______________
Follow PinkPantheress
