To some, having your diary confessions all over the internet might be their worst nightmare. For 20-year-old singer and songwriter PinkPantheress, her confessional lyrics accompanied by lo-fi, jungle, and drum’n’bass (DnB) beats have been anything but a bad dream.
Instead, songs like “Just for me,” “Break It Off,” and “Pain” have amassed 2.1M, 451.5k, 170.4K views on YouTube. She’s made Billboard's 21 Under 21 list and TikTok named her song “Just for Me” the breakout track of the summer.
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It's the confessional aspect of her lyrics, her knack for storytelling, and her love for the cringey but genuine outlooks of the early 2000s that makes us turn towards the word “nostalgia.” However, don't call her music new nostalgia.
“I get why people call it nostalgic, but I'd say that there was no new element about it. A lot of what you're hearing is garage, DnB, or jungle beats that [I] either sampled or tried to reinterpret in my own kind of way,” PinkPantheress tells Teen Vogue. Instead, she opts to describe her music as “‘ominous,’ for lack of a better word. ‘Dark but dancey.’”
And that’s just what she accomplished with her debut mixtape, to hell with it.
For this project, the Bath, England native wanted to “make different sounding music as opposed to just constant DnB and constant breakbeats.” Composed of 10 tracks, to hell with it features self-produced songs alongside collaborations with Mura Masa. But she also stays true to one of the genres that inspired her creative endeavors in the first place, emo music. “[It's] a lot of the instrumentals I used. For example, ‘Last valentines’ samples Linkin Park.”
The name to hell with it is also an ode to her beginnings, in a way.
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In past interviews, PinkPantheress mentioned she had created a ton of songs on GarageBand and turned to share them on TikTok since she saw how artists could garner so much attention overnight through the app. So, she tells Teen Vogue that this mixtape is her way of saying “to hell with it” and finally releasing the complete versions of the songs her followers and fans have been begging to listen to.
Don't get your hopes too high, though. Her songs are still snippet-sized and are mostly under two minutes. And it isn’t because of TikTok's three-minute maximum feature. Instead, PinkPantheress shares that it’s because she has a short attention span, “Once I've heard something too many times, I'm just ready to move on. So it just ends up being that way. I didn't actually even mean for it to be that short, but I'm just ready to stop recording.”
That doesn’t mean she isn’t open to exploring and growing as an artist. When asked where she sees PinkPantheress in the future, she shared that she wants to do more collaborations and try some more genres. “I'd like to do something with Kaytranada,” she says. “He's one of my favorite producers and I've always wondered what it would be like to jump on one of these beats.”
It's a beat that will most likely go viral on TikTok while countless people around the world use it to showcase their main character moments and play on repeat.
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Now, PinkPantheress isn’t as active on TikTok as she used to be since she values anonymity (her stage name was her TikTok handle which was inspired by the movie Pink Panther and just stuck). Instead, you’ll catch her listening to these five songs which she describes as the playlist of her life: “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy, “I’m Not Okay” by My Chemical Romance, “Kiss Me” by Sixpence, “Ski” by Young Thug, and “Need to Know” by Doja Cat.
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