FEATURE:
Nice to Meet You
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Hahn for Rolling Stone UK
Spotlighting the Incredible PinkPantheress and Her Forthcoming Debut Album, Heaven Knows
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BECAUSE the amazing PinkPantheress…
releases her debut album, Heaven Knows, on 10th November, I wanted to shine a light on the Somerset-born artist. One of our most remarkable talents, PinkPantheress is going to release one of the most important debut albums of the year. You can pre-order the album here. I want to get to a couple of interviews from PinkPantheress – one that was recently published and is in promotion of the upcoming release of Heaven Knows. For anyone who is not aware of PinkPantheress’s work, I am going to end with a playlist featuring some of her best tracks. Before then, Elle spoke with PinkPantheress about her song, Angel, being featured in the Barbie film earlier this year:
“You just released ”Angel” for the Barbie album. Can you tell me how you got involved with making the album for the film? Who approached you?
I think someone in the board meeting must have just brought up my name, and I think that they just were just like, “Yeah, let’s try and ask her.” And they did. I was actually gassed beyond belief, because, again, I do not think that anyone knows me. I’m always surprised. So, the fact that Greta Gerwig [does]...
I remember I was on a call with Mark Ronson [a producer on Barbie The Album] and he was naming my deep cut songs. I was like, “This is f-ing crazy.” So, I was really happy to be on it. And the song that I made...we just made a random little thing for it. It’s random, but I just felt like it was appropriate for the soundtrack. There’s an Irish jig moment in it.
I was going to say, the fiddle was a fun little moment.
Yeah, because the soundtrack reminded me of a 2000s Disney prom scene. I was just like, let’s try it and see what they think. I just wanted to have fun.
Did you get to see any of the movie to prepare?
I’ve seen a little bit. Everyone’s going to love it.
The sound of “Angel” is not what you’d expect from the Barbie film. Is that something that you intentionally wanted to do?
I get what you’re saying...I think it is actually so on par though! When I listen to that song, all I think about is the color pink. And when I think of pink, I think of Barbie. And then, the jig moment, I’m like, “No, I’m sorry. This is soundtrack music.” I don’t know. I was trying to make it so it was a song and soundtrack vibe. I wasn’t trying to have it be more of one or the other. But I like the other songs I’ve heard as well. I think they were good.
As for what else is coming next, what are you cooking up right now? Are you working on anything? An album?
Yeah, I’m trying to work on an album. I don’t know, I haven’t ever been much of a feature person until this year. I’ve been so into it. I’m just thinking, maybe a few features here and there. You never know. We’ll see what happens”.
f you are new to PinkPantheress and wondered about her path to Heaven Knows, then this Billboard interview from earlier in the year gives some background to a truly amazing artist. I do think that all eyes will be on PinkPantheress on 10th November. A definite late contender for album of the year:
“Nothing caught on — but when she took to TikTok in December 2020, seemingly overnight, she became an indie pop darling. “Pain” broke onto the U.K. Singles chart in August 2021 and peaked at No. 35. Later that year, she signed a deal with Parlophone and Elektra Records and released her first mixtape, To Hell With It. As booking offers came in for PinkPantheress — who had yet to perform live — her management at Upclose took things slowly, opting for smaller shows that allowed her to build an audience rather than going for festival stages.
“I remember my first few shows after my mixtape was out at the end of 2021 and [my management] were making me do rooms of like 100 people and 150 people,” she recalls. “The biggest room I did was probably 800. I remember thinking, ‘Why are these rooms so small?’ ”
“It has been superintentional,” says Jesse Gassongo-Alexander, PinkPantheress’ co-manager, when asked about helping her build a fan base after finding so much success online. “It was always a case of putting in the hard work and taking the slower route to build a foundation that is solid that’s going to allow her to stay here for a while.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Lia Clay Miller
Her story resembles that of another young female artist who managed to parlay massive online success into real-world results: rapper Ice Spice. On paper, PinkPantheress and Ice Spice may seem like photo negatives of each other — one’s a brash rapper from the Bronx who has no problem putting herself in the spotlight; the other’s an introverted singer who prefers the solitary pursuit of songwriting to industry glad-handing — but to PinkPantheress, they’re more alike than different. So much so that she offered Ice a spot on the remix to her hit song, “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2,” earlier this year.
“I feel like I don’t have that many peers that exist in a similar space to me,” she says. “I’m not talking about levels. I’m talking about internet space. I think a lot of people see me as being this, like, internet cutesy teen-pop girl. I feel like she was one of the newcomers whom I got drawn to because, even though she does drill and rap, it still feels like she’s in the same cutesy world to me. And she’s Black too, and that was a big important part of it to me. I prefer to collaborate with other Black artists.”
The song became an instant hit, her biggest so far, debuting at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 after going viral on TikTok. For many in the United States, “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” was the first time they had heard PinkPantheress. It got her her first BET Award nominations (best collaboration, BET Her Award), landed her an MTV Video Music Awards nod (best new artist) and ultimately peaked at No. 3.
Many believe she’s a lock for her first Grammy nomination thanks to the song — if she had to guess, probably for best pop duo/group performance. She’s taken aback and amused when told about the drama that has surrounded the Grammy Awards’ classification of certain albums by Black artists — even more so when she learns how disappointed Justin Bieber was when his album Changes got the nod for best pop vocal album instead of best R&B album.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lia Clay Miller
But even without a Grammy nomination, she can count this year as an unequivocal success. In addition to her biggest single yet, she appeared on Barbie: The Album — as good an “I’ve arrived” moment as any. But still, even as her career explodes, it’s surprising to hear that TikTok has taken a back seat.
“I didn’t leave it behind. I still post on it,” she says reassuringly. “I love using it to post my own videos, but I do not watch videos on there. Because like a year ago, I would scroll and I’d see too many TikToks about me. I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ ”
Makes sense. Her management team trusts her to make the best decisions for herself. “I think she has shown how globally intelligent she is by being one of the earlier trendsetters,” Gassongo-Alexander says. “Coming from TikTok and appealing to a wider audience and then knowing how to retain that wider audience.”
How does PinkPantheress plan to keep growing that audience? By keeping on keeping on, it seems. She’s uninterested in sacrificing her core audience at the altar of pop stardom. Thankfully, her music is naturally easy on pop fan ears. “What I’ve realized is that my natural way of writing is more pop-friendly than anything,” she says. “So even though the beats can be kind of alternative, I still write in a very standard structure. And I make sure all the lyrics are tangible. And because of that, I think that it has made the [music] that I’m doing very accessible to mainstream audiences. But my biggest fear is having people hear me do a [song] and recognize that I’m doing it for the wrong reasons”.
I will end with a new interview form Rolling Stone. Such a sensational artist whose music is original and imaginative. I do think that PinkPantheress is one of our most important young artists. Someone primed for world domination! Heaven Knows is shaping up to be a truly incredible album:
“Raised in the suburbs of Kent, PinkPantheress, 22, was drawn to London from an early age, and moved there as soon as she could, for university. When she was propelled to notoriety a few years back, she was still studying film — one of many young people robbed of the full student experience by the pandemic. But it was that forced confinement that gave her extra time to experiment with music. She recorded at home, mostly on GarageBand, challenging herself to consistently put snippets of songs out into the world. (PinkPantheress was her TikTok username.) “Day 2 of posting my song until someone notices it,” she wrote in the text accompanying an early TikTok. And then, at first gradually and then seemingly all at once, without uttering her birth name or initially showing her entire face, suddenly millions of people did notice.
In 2021, PinkPantheress released her debut mixtape, To Hell with It, 19 minutes of melodies, samples and reinterpretations of house, drum-and-bass and cybercore soundscapes about teenage tribulations: loneliness, family conflict, crashing your car, and failing your A-levels. From there, things kept taking off: she scored spots on blockbuster soundtracks — Wakanda Forever and Barbie — and collaborated with Willow Smith, Skrillex, Kaytranada, Troye Sivan, Destroy Lonely and Ice Spice, who joined her for ‘Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2’, a global hit and her biggest track to date, amassing more than a billion streams.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Hahn
Though her bite-size tracks (and concerts) have been known to speed past you with the headiness of a sugar rush, PinkPantheress is in it for the long haul, harnessing her TikTok-farmed momentum into a four-dimensional career. Her debut album, Heaven knows (due out on 10 November), is all about growth — both personally and artistically. In this new patchwork, you might find a riff on Oxlade’s Afrobeats hit ‘Ku Lo Sa’, hefty gothic organ chords, lengthy rock-guitar solos, strings, or the sound of thunderous rain. Collaborators include Greg Kurstin, Mura Masa and Cash Cobain, among others. “It was hard to let go of drum-and-bass, but …” she says a little wistfully, looking off into the distance for a second before snapping back. “It wasn’t, actually — it was so easy. I just realised I had to mature lyrically and do things like sampling in a different way. We’ve got more guitars in there, more live instruments.”
Even with some of her defining references disappearing in the rearview mirror, the PinkPantheress sound still has the same singular, addictive essence, I tell her. “Essence,” she agrees, emphasising the sibilance in the word a few more times. “That’s true. Every artist I love has an essence.… You just can’t mistake their songs [for anyone else], even if they use multiple genres. Someone like Lily [Allen], even aside from her singing voice, you always know it’s her because of the subject matter, or the tone, or the vibe of the instrumental. Some artists are really smart at being able to kind of pack their stuff up in a suitcase and then unload it onto a new track.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Hahn
PinkPantheress’s music carries a similar tension, with lyrics often teetering on the edge of darkness, but delivered with sweetness and playful production that seems to unburden you from the weight of those problems, or at least create a space where for a few minutes they don’t matter. If anything, spending more time in the land of palm trees and permanent summer may have added a sprinkle of bliss to the bleakness: “That’s the thing. Previous to this album, I’d never recorded anywhere else but London, so that’s new, and probably why the songs do sound different. But I can never lose the Britishness in me.”
Heaven knows started out as an ode to those beginnings, she tells me. “I actually wanted [this album] to sound like classic Brit pop, and then it ended up turning into something I actually don’t know how to categorise. Like, I have no idea. I guess it’s alt-pop,” she offers. Genre has always been a tricky subject when it comes to PinkPantheress. When she first emerged, many listeners took the opportunity to point out her influences — from jungle to drum-and-bass to garage especially. Her success became an overdue reason to spotlight the rich history of electronic music and club culture in the UK. She took on that mantle gracefully, citing her inspirations and samples across interviews, dissecting the significance of Y2K culture for her generation, and giving flowers where flowers were due.
Today, she stands firmer than ever in the place she created for herself, rooted in something far deeper than just nostalgia: “When people say, ‘Oh, she’s not original,’ or ‘She hasn’t done anything different,’ or ‘I’ve heard artists like her before,’ they can never name me a single one. Because even if you name people back in the 2000s, they didn’t really sound like me, and I don’t sound like them.” Of course, she has inspirations, but today they’re more eclectic than you might guess — Imogen Heap’s openhearted, whimsical storytelling, Grace Jones’s decades-long career, Lily Allen’s inimitable voice. “I think people forget that music is more than just the beat.… Unless you’re finding someone that uses this type of beat, and writes about the same thing that I do, and in the same melodic way that I do, then I am the first person you’ve heard make this kind of music”.
Following 2021’s mixtape, To Hell with It, we are going to get a much-anticipated debut studio album. We have heard three singles from it already. They sound amazing! Having taken her sound to new places after that 2021 mixtape, we are primed to receive a wonderful album from the mighty PinkPantheress. She really is…
AN artist to behold.