Like many pop culture sensations around the turn of the 2020s,
PinkPantheress quickly became famous thanks to video-focused social media service TikTok. Initially posting brief loops of songs she worked on after coming home from her classes for the day, the clips went viral, and her audience expanded further after she signed to Parlophone and began releasing singles. Calling her style "new nostalgic," her music borrows heavily from dance and pop music of the '90s and early 2000s, with the ecstatic surge of liquid drum'n'bass and the clipped, staccato beats of U.K. garage and 2-step driving many of her songs. Her intimate vocals disguise lyrics about loneliness, heartache, and desire in sugary melodies, helping them resonate in the same bittersweet manner as past U.K. dance hits like
T2 and Jodie Aysha's 2007 smash "Heartbroken." There's parallels between
PinkPantheress's style and some of the more dance-adjacent indie R&B artists of the 2010s, like
Kelela and
Abra, but her sincere lyrics and intricate melodies, which make the best of her limited vocal range, put her closer to the league of bedroom pop and the less garish corners of the PC Music world.
To Hell with It,
PinkPantheress's debut mixtape, gathers most of her previously issued singles, several of which became charting pop hits in the U.K. and New Zealand. She's even found success stateside, where U.K. garage and drum'n'bass are beloved by certain anglophiles, ravers, and music journalists, but largely remain obscure to the general public. The entire release clocks in at under 20 minutes, with the ten tracks initially feeling more like preview clips rather than full songs. The brisk tempos and urgent lyrics beg for repeated listens, however, and the mixtape quickly becomes addictive. Her interpolation of familiar but not overused samples (including the keyboards from
Crystal Waters' "Gypsy Woman" and the
Satie-mirroring chord sequence of
Sweet Female Attitude's "Flowers") transcends clever gimmickry, and she brilliantly snakes her delicate voice around the kinetic, tightly wound beats in such an unforced, carefree way, yet there's still plenty of emotional weight to what she's saying. There's such a grin-inducing rush to the way her shouted "Hey!" or "Yeah!" ad libs echo from the speakers. The acoustic guitar-based "Just for Me" is a teenage confession of an intense crush set to a 2-step shuffle ("I'm obsessed with you in a way I can't believe/When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?"), and the drum'n'bass tracks, particularly the slamming "Noticed I Cried" and the sly "Break It Off" (based on
Adam F's classic "Circles," originally released six years before
PinkPantheress was born), match the exhilarating beats with direct lyrics that aim straight for the heart. A pair of mellower tracks near the end, the dembow-inspired "All My Friends Know" and the lush, string-laden "Nineteen," are more restrained yet just as considered and affectionate, pointing to a potential direction for an artist whose emergence was one of the most welcome left-field surprises of 2021. ~ Paul Simpson