PinkPantheress Won’t Be Boxed In

“My name is Pink, and I’m really glad to meet you.” Those are the first words you hear on PinkPantheress’s new mixtape, Fancy That—though you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d been introduced already. Since bursting onto the internet with her UK garage and jungle-infused SoundCloud tracks back in 2021, the 24-year-old has blossomed from a faceless bedroom producer to one of Britain’s most exciting next-gen pop stars. Her breakout hit, 2022’s cheeky kiss-off “Boy’s a Liar,” shot to number three on the Billboard Hot 100, while her accomplished 2023 debut album, Heaven Knows, served as a genre-bending rollercoaster ride through various corners of dance music, artfully paired with the musician’s candyfloss vocals and lyrics that charted the emotional topography of young love—with a dash of winking British humor.

Except, as PinkPantheress explains over Zoom from New York a few days before the mixtape’s release, she’s never really seen herself as a pop star. “I’m not looking for stardom,” she says, her long French-tipped nails flicking back her fringe. “I don’t think that I fit that role, and I also don’t think I can handle it.” Last year, as her stratospheric rise to popularity was peaking—she’d just won the Billboard Women in Music award for producer of the year, and been announced as a tour opener for both Olivia Rodrigo and Coldplay—she made the difficult decision to reel things back. “I needed just to remedy myself a bit, and help myself feel better,” she says of pulling out of the tour dates and stepping away from the spotlight. It didn’t take long, however, for the urge to make music to return. “I ended up taking that break to home in on a specific sound,” she says. “That’s why I’m more excited, I’d say, about this release—because it’s way more specific and way more in tune with what I wanted for myself.”

So, on Fancy That, PinkPantheress is reintroducing herself. Not as an entirely different musician, exactly, but as PinkPantheress 2.0—a little more refined, and a lot more certain of who she is. And it’s certainly an impressive leveling up from her (already excellent) debut album. Over the course of the mixtape’s nine tracks, PinkPantheress cycles through a head-spinning grab bag of references mined from the ’90s and 2000s: the Underworld-sampling opener “Illegal,” whose saucy double entendres could either refer to a secret romance or a beloved new drug dealer; the eerie “Nice to Know You,” which samples William Orbit to create a deliciously strange hybrid of Burial and the Sugababes; or the superb album closer “Romeo,” on which trip-hop rhythms are paired with exhilarating orchestral strings straight out of a Basement Jaxx house banger. (It turns out the duo behind Basement Jaxx spent a couple of sessions in the studio with PinkPantheress, and she also samples their track “Romeo” on “Girl Like Me.”)