PinkPantheress

One Liner: electro pop with a squeaky Brit

Wikipedia Genre: pop, bedroom pop, dance, alt-pop, drum and bass, 2-step, jungle (that may be longest list of genres I've seen yet)
Home: London

Poster Position: 10
Both Weekends.  Sunday.

Thoughts: Another artist that went viral on TikTok and grew her popularity from there.  Apparently her initial hit was called "Break it Off," and after that one blew up she got signed to a label.  She's English, and her Wikipedia says that when she was 12 years old, her father moved to the United States to work at a university in Austin, Texas.  Hey!  Welcome!  Maybe her dad can come watch her set after he finishes up teaching his statistics class at the University of Austin.  Her Wikipedia also says that she started off by singing in a rock band that covered songs by Paramore - maybe she'll take the stage with Paramore and jam out for a song!  Loads of possibilities here!

Only one album - 2021's to hell with it, and two of those songs have obviously hit big time.  The first one is called "Pain," and definitely has a very British electro type of beat.  177.2 million streams.

Kinda snappy little beat.  I wonder if this is 2-step or jungle or drum and bass?  I used to find those Pink Panther cartoons very funny as a kid.  Like Sherlock Holmes and Wylie Coyote melded together.  My key issue with this song is that her voice is so high and whispery.  Grates on me a little bit.  Also very weird that the song is so short.  It clocks in at 1:38, but the song really ends at 1:09.  Odd.  The TikTok hit is the other big streamer at 115 million - "Break It Off."

Another minute and a half track.  I found some pleasure in some of the Brit rappers like Skepta and Stormzy, and Little Simz is great, but I'm not sure I understand the allure of this breakneck beat choice with her high-pitched whispering on top.

But what do I know, right?  Her debut album came out at #20 on the UK Albums Chart, and she recently won the BBC's Sound of 2022 poll.  She was nominated for the Brit Award for Song of the Year as well, and is now touring as the opener for Halsey.  So while I'm questioning the sound, it looks like everyone else is digging in.  I'll provide you this section of the Wikipedia, so you can see what others have said:  "The Guardian's Michael Cragg described PinkPantheress's vocals as "sweet but unsettling", while Jon Caramanica of The New York Times wrote that she "sounds like she's flirting and aching all at once." Cat Zhang of Pitchfork called PinkPantheress's voice "angelic", "girlish", and "slight" and wrote that she was "one of the rare TikTok artists whose internet fame seems proportional to their potential". Felicity Martin of Dazed called her lyrics "sad" and "wistful". Writing for Nylon, Steffanee Wang called her music "a collage of sounds that fell [sic] simultaneously dated and contemporary", adding that listening to it "feels like being on the internet before social media was a thing". Insider's Kieran Press-Reynolds wrote that PinkPantheress gave uptempo electronic music genres like drum and bass an "introspective, romantic bedroom sound" with her "hushed" vocals."

I'm glad that she's killing it, and I hope a bunch of people want to go see her do the high-pitched whisper breakbeat party.  But I'd prefer not to.