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PinkPantheress will concede that she is absolutely a child of the internet. Steeped in nostalgic late nineties and early noughties references, her short flip-phone ringtone-esque tracks, featuring lyrics of Lily Allen lucidity over mostly garage and drum ‘n’ bass beats, make the familiar addictively fresh in the way only a musician reared on memes could.
In turn, PinkPantheress has entirely captivated the internet. Her six hyperpop tracks soundtrack millions of Tik Toks, the platform they first took off on, and circulate all over Instagram and Twitter. On Apple Music and Spotify, they have amassed hundreds of millions of total streams. She has collaborated with Central Cee and Goldlink, and doesn’t deny rumours a Charli XCX duet is in the works. With one 480p music video out, only two TikToks featuring her face, and a few lo-fi pixelated pictures, mystery surrounds the 20-year-old, bringing with it rabid speculation from all corners of the globe about who she is.
Hers is a distinctly internet kind of fame. “Something that was quite noticeable was that nothing changed,” she tells Vogue from behind a blue screen on Zoom. “Everything’s been online, so it hasn’t been like I’ve left my house and I’ve been swarmed by people. It honestly feels like a double life. It feels like I’ve got my real life which is like me and my friends, and that other life, which is just on my phone.”
Her air of mystery is less a product of an aloof or carefully curated character — she’s surprisingly unfiltered and chatty, with self-deprecating humour – more that of a shy girl deciding how much to share with legions of new obsessives. “I’m aware that if I post something, and it somehow manages to circle back to something private of me, people will definitely find it.” And, having been so suddenly propelled into the spotlight, she goes back and forth, wanting to be seen and invisible all at once. “When I’ve just posted something I get so self-conscious, I literally want to delete every picture of myself ever,” she laughs. “It’s a duality.”
Listening to a school peer play the drums to “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance “was literally the point where I transitioned to the online world,” she explains. “I was just like, I’m in. I’m in now.” Spending all after-school hours watching music videos and interviews of her favourite bands, “was a feeling like no other.”
K-Pop inducted her into stan communities –“they’re a crazy, crazy, crazy community, it was really fun” – and she made an anonymous fan page on Instagram for pop-punk bands like Pierce The Veil and All Time Low, which “didn’t get exactly get a dumb amount of followers but it did reach the thousand follow mark at some point,” she recalls. “I remember being like ‘Yeah, this is me. This is my personality.’” But, before she started making music as PinkPantheress, “I kind of didn’t have the nerve to actually be an open internet personality.”
Born in Bath to a Kenyan mother and English father, she grew up in mostly homogenous Kent. “I think if I didn’t live with my mum… maybe I would have straightened my hair or something like that to fit in. I definitely was lucky in that aspect. I never forgot where I was from.” A love of editing celebrity fancams led her to study film at UAL, but she harboured music as a dream since seeing Paramore on stage at Reading Festival when she was 14. “You think about how much fun [Hayley Williams is] having, and she’s also getting paid for it. I was like, ‘that would be just an insane job.’”
At 17, she started making GarageBand productions for her friend, R&B singer MaZz. “I was a lot better than I am now. I feel like my skills have decreased.” Secretly, alone in her room, she experimented on her own songs. “I wouldn’t even call it producing, I was kind of just speeding instrumentals and singing over them.” As a garage and drum ’n’ bass lover, she thought “‘Yeah, why not try singing over?” Testing her vocals on instrumentals, “just trying to see how a top line would fit into it,” she shared them to Soundcloud and TikTok under a screenname referencing her favourite films (the Steve Martin one being her ultimate.)
“Pain” was the first to blow in January, preparing her for “that times ten” with “Break It Off”. With so many fans keenly anticipating her first record, she opted instead to put out a mixtape – To hell with it, which totals just 19 minutes – rather than an album. “It’s there but not a humongous moment," she says, of relieving some of that pressure. There are a couple change-ups, “some people haven’t really heard me go slow yet, which is something that I’ve always been keen to do,” she says. But "it’s definitely in the same world. And a bit dark in some places, because I’m a big fan of all things dark.”
Where does her love of the Noughties come from? “I think that the kids of today love alternative shit and being different, myself included,” she muses. “They don’t want to be the popular girl, and I think the 2000s was like, the coolest moment for that… Being the loser was kind of a cool thing.” For Gen Z, “I feel like the resurgence is just because we saw how cool of a time it was that we weren’t around to actually enjoy for ourselves.” Contemplating, she adds “I really am interested to see how long this Y2K era exists” with the removed calm of an artist sure of their own sound beyond any wider trend.
She laments she’ll never experience essential elements of those eras, like gigging your way up from tiny venues into prominence. “Now it’s like, Okay, you’ve made your songs on the internet. They’ve got this many streams. Now, you have to go and play the big stage,” she reflects. “I think maybe in another life, I would have preferred to be doing the smaller venues and working up.” Never having done it before, does the idea of her first concert intimidate her? “I am very nervous at performing,” she says. “When I was younger it wasn’t great. It’s like ‘stare at the floor, don’t look up.’ But it’s definitely something that will come.”
Although her offline life isn’t dramatically different, it has transformed. Of course, there’s the new opportunities open to her, she’s sort of dropped out of university (she hasn’t re-enrolled) and her success has made her much “more confident”. Her dramatic rise “is overwhelming,” she says, but in many ways, it could have been faster. “The amount of manifestation that was being done was stupid. Almost too much manifestation. I was doing some pretty extra shit at some point. I think I was literally, like, speaking up to the sky,” she laughs. “It's something that I’ve wanted for a long time, so it’s nice it’s actually happening,”
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