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 genres 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 herself. 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.')
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Chris Martin's Emotional Moment During This Song May Show How He's Handling the Dakota Johnson Split
Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin's breakup has been on everyone's minds since the news broke. While we're still devastated at the end of one of our favorite celebrity couples, it seems we may not be the only ones. In a recent clip of Martin performing, he's gotten fans misty-eyed, and so many are now wondering how the breakup has affected him. On June 19, the popular X account PopTingz shared a video from Coldplay's latest gig. They shared the video of Martin with the caption reading, 'During 'Sparks,' Chris Martin gets emotional, adding 'yes I will' after 'I won't let you down.'' More from SheKnows Chris Martin Just Wore a Telling Accessory Amid First Outing Since Dakota Johnson Split You can see the video HERE! Now, first things first: he didn't add anything. Per Genius, the lyrics in that part of the song go: 'But I won't let you down/ Oh, yeah, I will, yeah, I will, yes, I will.' So, no, he didn't add anything new to the song, but we can admit one thing: he does look more visibly emotional than other times he's sung this song live. 'Sparks' is one of Coldplay's most well-known songs, and it was a track from the band's debut album Parachutes, which was released in 2000. The song is about 'someone who tries to get someone to remember them again,' according to Genius. Now, Martin is an emotional performer, but the timing of this after his breakup from Johnson, plus how visibly emotional he looked while performing, has made people wonder how he's handling the breakup. Along with that, his previous outing with an accessory meaning 'freedom,' has got speculation brewing on how he's handling it all behind closed doors. For those who don't know, Johnson and Martin started dating in 2017 after being set up by mutual friends. They didn't confirm their relationship until a year later, but then, there was a rumor that they briefly broke up in the summer of 2019. However, they quickly reconciled, and they moved in together in 2021. While we don't know the exact time they got engaged, many sources claim it was years ago, but the two weren't too eager to set a date. But the engagement became public at the beginning of 2025. Sadly, Martin and Johnson seemingly called it quits for good in June 2025. A source spoke to The Sun about what led to their recent breakup, saying, 'They really tried to work through their issues but the age gap was often a problem and she'd expressed that she may want children in the future, whereas Chris is kind of done with that part of his life but they discussed it.'Best of SheKnows 23 Age-Gap Couples Who Met When One of Them Was Still a Child Everything to Know About Leonardo DiCaprio's 27-Year-Old GF Vittoria Ceretti A Look Back at Prince William's Sexiest Photos in Celebration of the Future King
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Here's why a classic Radiohead song is back in the charts again – and our pick of their best test tracks
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. If you're the sort of backwards cap-wearing whippersnapper who spends more time than they'd like to admit trawling the endless swathes of short-form content on popular social media platform TikTok, you may have already run into Radiohead's Let Down without even realising it. The jury's still out on TikTok and its impact on the still-forming brains of our society's youth, but for exposing audiences to new (and old) music that's often outside of the mainstream, it's performing a surprisingly valuable service. Let Down is just one of the many tracks enjoying a major resurgence thanks to its popularity on short-form social media. According to Forbes, the fifth track from Radiohead's seminal 1997 behemoth OK Computer has enjoyed such a revival that it's in danger of troubling the official US Hot 100 chart ranking, and it's not the only tune to have enjoyed such a retroactive bump. The likes of Alphaville's Forever Young, Coldplay's Everything's Not Lost and Modern Talking's Cheri Cheri Lady have become reborn colossi across the likes of YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, accompanying everything from Premier League goals compilations to in-depth makeup tutorials. I'll let you decide which of those I watch more often. Long may this continue. If TikTok gets more people listening to Radiohead and OK Computer, so much the better. That said, much as I appreciate the love for Let Down, it wouldn't be my go-to for testing anything from headphones to hi-fi. Instead, I'd direct audiences, be they teen TikTok trawlers or grizzled fellow Millennials, to the delights of another masterwork, this time taken from 2000's equally acclaimed masterwork Kid A. Let Down is great, but Everything In Its Right Place is the one to go for if you're serious about giving a product a chance to flex its muscles. We, as a What Hi-Fi? collective, have been using it since before TikTok was even a thing, and while it's another track enjoying something of a renaissance thanks to social media, we can't take much of the credit for the revival. Everything In Its Right Place represents, if such a thing exists, the definitive essence of Radiohead. It's an ethereal concoction, blending woozy, otherworldly synth sounds and warm, fuzzy keyboards with the unsettling glitches and twitches of a malfunctioning motherboard, pulling together seemingly contrary elements into a composition that feels both reassuringly warm and enveloping yet disturbingly fractured and bizarre. Perhaps the track's title would be best served by the inclusion of a question mark at its tail: Everything In Its Right Place? It's a sublime tester for anything you feel needs a test room challenge, but we particularly like the track for testing a pair of speakers. Those glitchy effects flit from one speaker to the other, elucidating how well a pair can handle organisation and separation, while Thom Yorke's arcing vocals should have both solidity and depth between your chosen pair of contenders. A great test of stereo imaging, then. We listen to a good deal of dear old Thom and his Oxford-born buddies, so we know which idiosyncrasies and vocal textures to seek out from that instantly recognisable falsetto. Yorke's voice should soar to appropriate heights, of course, but it's those oft-hidden elements, be they a slight hesitancy at the beginning of a line or the peaks and swells when singing words such as "everything" or "place" that should be tracked with absolute precision. We always come back to the same question: does he sound like he's singing at a pre-show rehearsal, or is this a man trying to communicate something with real emotional power? The longer it goes on, the more the intensity rises. Everything In Its Right Place might start off at a creeping pace, but it's the increasing sense of urgency as both tempo and volume build which creates, if you have the equipment, that paralysing sense of drama and heft. Once you're past the 1:30 mark, you should sense an active shift as the track changes gears from languid scene-setting to a clamorous and incessant climax in which layers upon layers pile upon one another, creating a dramatic denouement which should instil both panic and awe in equal measure. If you don't feel that change in tone, however, you may be dealing with hi-fi that doesn't have enough flexibility or sense of drama to take things to the next level. This being Radiohead, it's all about playing with your emotions. Do you feel unsettled yet intrigued by the track's moody, ambient opening, or just bored and uninvolved? Do you feel adrenalised yet slightly overwhelmed as it builds to its climax, or do you sense that the track, or the gear you're using to play it, is holding back? It's been something of a thrill to see social media reinvigorate the fortunes of various unexpected tunes, or else introduce a new generation of fans to music that isn't throwaway pop or a YouTube star's latest generic cash-in. If you're new to the world of Radiohead and want a truly mind-altering experience, I'd urge you to seek out Everything In Its Right Place. And if you want that experience to be genuinely life-altering, I'd urge you even more strongly to find headphones or hi-fi that can do it proper justice. MORE: JBL, Bose and Cambridge Audio: these are the 5 freshly announced products that are on our radar These are the best Radiohead tracks for testing your hi-fi 7 tracks we've been enjoying in our test rooms over the past month
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Forbes
Coldplay's Quarter-Century-Old Song Debuts On Several Charts At Once
Coldplay's 2000 track 'Sparks' goes viral and debuts on five Billboard charts, nearly entering the ... More Hot 100 and pushing Parachutes back onto an albums tally. In this image released on December 12, 2024, Coldplay at the 2024 Billboard Music Awards. (Photo by Anna Lee/Penske Media via Getty Images) Coldplay is currently in year four of its Music of the Spheres World Tour. The trek promotes the band's albums Music of the Spheres and Moon Music, which were released in 2021 and 2024, respectively. While the most recent project by the English pop-rock group has vacated charts seemingly everywhere, it's the band itself that still appears on a handful of tallies, including in the United States this week. Coldplay earns a new hit not with something from its most recent full-lengths or a tune being heavily promoted on its tour, but rather with a viral favorite. 'Sparks' Debuts on Five Billboard Charts 'Sparks' debuts on five Billboard charts in the United States this week. The tune largely hits genre-specific rankings, but also manages to approach the all-style, all-encompassing Hot 100, missing out on doing so by just a few spots. Instead, it opens at No. 11 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 – which is reserved for those tunes that almost made it to the top list – and it could rise in the coming weeks, giving Coldplay another placement on the competitive tally. Coldplay's New Top 20 Smash 'Sparks' arrives inside the top 20 on the Hot Rock Songs, Hot Alternative Songs, and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts. The tune kicks off its time at No. 13 on the first two lists and at No. 15 on the latter, which blends both rock and alternative music. On the Alternative Streaming Songs chart, 'Sparks' opens at No. 25. Coldplay's Parachutes Returns 'Sparks' was originally released in the summer of 2000, but it was never pushed as a single. As the track's virality on sites like TikTok grows and total consumption increases, Parachutes – the album that features the cut – also returns to one Billboard tally. The full-length, which introduced Coldplay to the world, reappears at No. 50, in last place, on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart.
