By now, you know what a PinkPantheress song sounds like. Whether her songs made it onto your for-you-page in 2021, you heard her on the Mark Ronson-produced Barbie soundtrack, or you were shaking ass to one of her summer fest mix edits, PinkPantheress’ sound is unmistakable: twinkly synths and wispy vocals layered over drum ‘n’ bass and two-step beats. It’s a distinctly post-2020 internet sound, a younger sibling to hyperpop—smoothed out and scuffed up, taking away the digital sheen and adding in the daily concerns of 24-year-olds everywhere: trifling boys, insecurities, and whether or not to bounce to the next party. Similar artists, like yuné pinku, Piri, and Tommy, struggled to bring their pop out of the bedroom, but PinkPantheress and her piles of viral Gen Z hits catapulted to a wider stage once “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2,” featuring Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice and produced by Mura Masa, exploded in the summer of 2023.
After releasing her debut album Heaven knows that November and encountering a slew of cancelled tour dates, including her opening slots for Olivia Rodrigo and Coldplay, PinkPantheress returned to the studio with a small bastion of collaborators, including Basement Jaxx, the Dare, aksel arvid, and Count Baldor. They left the recording booth with Fancy That, a brisk, 20-minute mixtape that has almost as much to do with early 2000s teen pop as it does with the UK breakbeat mainstays that form the core of her sound. PinkPantheress’ songwriting is as tight and infectious as ever; there is no room for digressions in the attention economy. The mainstream retroness points to her ambitions beyond the dancefloor, but her over-reliance on samples can leave listeners with a record that struggles to be more than the sum of its parts.
“Romeo” manages to be the best of both worlds. Melding whooshing strings reminiscent of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” with dopamine-rush drum breaks, the song is an ode to the kind of doomed crushes that somehow only get hotter because they’re doomed. The guitar sample comes from, of all things, “With You” by Jessica Simpson, a move that’s a little funny and a little dumb, lightweight and catchy the way all summer songs should be. Then there’s “Stateside,” the album’s final single, which is basically a riff on Estelle’s “American Boy” by way of a big sample from Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me.” It’s a mid-tempo stomper, a perfect backtrack for the kind of dancefloor moves that are really just a series of sassy poses strung together. Meanwhile, “Nice to Know” sports shades of Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent” before tilting into a colorful club banger.
But the stitches start to show. Sampling has always been the backbone of PinkPantheress’ music—it’s the same reference-heavy, everything-is-everything zoomer mindset that helped her songs connect with young, restless audiences in the first place. Her breakout song “Pain” was an interpolation of UK garage megahit “Flowers,” while another one of her early successes, “Break It Off,” relied heavily on a sample from Adam F’s rave classic “Circles.” This time around, Fancy That kicks off with one of Underworld’s most most recognizable synth lines from “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”—a melodic motif that shows up, in some version, in the first three songs, although it’s unclear if the resemblance was intended to suggest a DJ mixing between tracks or if it’s just coincidence. “Girl Like Me” borrows from Basement Jaxx’s “Romeo” on the hook, but the singalong of “let it all go” feels a little clunkier the second time around.
“Tonight” whips out a Panic! at the Disco sample, nodding to Pink’s interests in emo and pop-punk (she sampled Paramore’s “Where You Are” on “Willow”), before unfurling into a sliding and shining house track complete with sweet strings and mellow keys. The music video features a raucous, rococo house party, complete with a TikTok-ready dance, in a Marie Antoinette riff that seemingly every pop star must try at some point. No one’s ever accused PinkPantheress of reheating Madonna’s nachos—instead, PinkPantheress is at her best when she’s sounding like the daydreams of young women everywhere, putting on lipgloss before the party, drafting flirty texts with friends, and gossipping over boba tea on the subway platform. But this is just the thing: PinkPantheress has become so recognizable in her hallmark sound that no amount of nostalgic, Y2K pop cues or IYKYK club samples can truly shake up the formula.
With the intimacy of her referential vocals, cross-generational vocabulary, and two-step drum programming, PinkPantheress has managed to split the difference between bedroom pop and the dancefloor. Her club bonafides are no joke—she’s collaborated with the likes of Central Cee, Kaytranada, Overmono, Skrillex, and Trippie Redd—but some in the dance community still question her authenticity. There are some drum ‘n’ bass purists who may always take issue with her pop interpretations of the sound, while some pop super-stans may demand more from her stage presence IRL (much has been made of her tendency to carry a purse when she’s onstage, but, hey, so did Aretha.)
Meanwhile, the pop industry, which is generally slow to give jungle, dub, EDM, and house artists like Peggy Gou, Skrillex, and Four Tet their roses, has taken notice of PinkPantheress—it’s hard to not catch a glimpse of someone who’s doing numbers like her on TikTok and Spotify without major label intervention. Two of her biggest hits are nearly at a billion streams apiece. In 2024, Billboard even named PinkPantheress its second annual Producer of the Year. Fancy That is the sound of someone working through her influences and working through her place in the industry, but it’s never bogged down. Feather light and bubbly, PinkPantheress will soon be on to the next melody, the next sample, purse in hand.
