To Hell With It

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 drumnbass 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 Ayshas 2007 smash Heartbroken. There are parallels between PinkPantheress 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 debut mixtape, gathers most of her previously issued singles, several of which became charting pop hits in the U.K. and New Zealand. She even found success stateside, where U.K. garage and drumnbass 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 Attitudes Flowers) transcends clever gimmickry, and she brilliantly snakes her delicate voice around the kinetic, tightly wound beats in such an unforced, carefree way that theres still plenty of emotional weight to what shes saying. Theres 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 (Im obsessed with you in a way I cant believe/When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?), and the drumnbass tracks, particularly the slamming Noticed I Cried and the sly Break It Off (based on Adam Fs 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