Letting expectations go: PinkPantheress is entering a new era

“Sorry, I yap a lot,” PinkPantheress jokes as she gets into the flow of her conversation with Mixmag over Zoom. Like many of her Gen Z peers who love the word, she’s inclined to talk excessively or go on enthusiastic side-tangents during conversation. For the most part, Pink’s verbal spiels sit firmly in the latter definition, as she speaks eagerly and in-depth about her upcoming project and the process of its creation. “Please, yap away,” I encourage, as she laughs before continuing to reveal more about the anticipated release.

On the first day of January, she hinted at the news on social media, writing: “oh we are soooo back #2025,” accompanied by images of her working in a home studio setup. “i missed y’all thanks for waiting on me,” she added. Her post marked the first signs of movement from the 23-year-old British musician, since she made the decision to cancel her remaining 2024 tour dates last August, including support slots with Olivia Rodrigo and Coldplay, as well as the final leg of her own Capable of Love headline tour. She cited focusing on her own physical health and wellbeing as the reason for her choice.

Instead of performing, she’s been cooking in the studio since the end of summer 2024, making what she describes as her most “hands on” project since her 2021 debut mixtape ‘to hell with it’. “This [new] one is about letting [expectations] go,” she explains. “I’ve always been trying to strike a balance between being a popstar and also being experimental…but if you like it you like it, and if you don’t you don’t.”

Pink launched herself into the music world when her breakbeat-infused pop songs went viral on TikTok in 2021, with her tracks such as ‘Break It Off’ and ‘Just for Me’ doing rounds on the app and introducing global audiences to the UK underground sound. She was born in Kent, but moved to London to study film at UAL and found herself bored in lockdown and experimenting with music making. While initially releasing the music in short snippets onto the app completely anonymously, mostly in hopes of getting feedback on what types of sounds people were interested in, she later put the pseudonym ‘PinkPantheress’ to her tracks, got noticed, and eventually released her debut mixtape in October 2021 and dropped out of university. “In a weird way I kind of did [expect my music to blow up],” she admits. “I’m a manifester so for me there was no option of it not working, it was just a matter of when. I expected to blow up but not to the height that it did, I didn’t expect to be here right now at all.”

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In 2022 she released the three-track EP ‘Take me home’, and in 2023 she dropped her debut album ‘Heaven Knows’. Since her breakthrough, she has worked and collaborated with the likes of Central Cee, Kaytranada, Overmono, Skrillex and Trippie Redd. Pink also took home the Best Female Act MOBO Award in 2022, the BBC’s Sound of 2022 title, and was Billboard’s Producer of The Year in 2024. But all roads have led her to making her upcoming project, something that she feels proud of and a representation of the lessons she’s learned in the music game over the past few years.

Though details of her new project are firmly under wraps, with only a May 9 date announced, fans can expect the continuation of her genre-bending style, reimagining elements of jungle, breakbeats and 2-step garage with ethereal vocals. This time, however, she was also inspired by trip hop, house, big beat, and older electronic music, as the selections in her Cover Mix playlist indicate. It’s evident in the tracks which contain crackles of the heavy distortions synonymous with bass music, and the elements of the orchestral and cinematic-side of old-school house music. At the time of making the project, Pink was listening to music by the likes of Fatboy Slim and Groove Armada. “I loved the size of the music,” she says. “All the music sounds so big and grand and present, and I really wanted to make music where it sounds like a statement is being made with the songs. I feel like that was what appealed to me, and it’s something that I wanted to take on board.”

The project is also laden with samples, a PinkPantheress music staple. It features some musical references from her previous songs, Easter eggs for the “real fans” as she says, including sampled vocals from ‘Starz In Their Eyes’ by Just Jack, a song that she used the beat from in her 2021 track ‘Attracted to You’.

“Sampling is funny because everyone has their opinions about it. Some people think it's stealing or unoriginal, which is something I dealt with a lot when I was starting. But for me sampling is my way of sharing a love for something and reinterpreting it. I would only sample something I love, I would never sample something for the thought of it having nostalgia-bait or whatever reason. I do it because I want to reinterpret something I love to different audiences.”

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Expanding her own production skills, and letting go of control in the studio, was possibly the biggest challenge Pink faced. She taught herself music production on what she describes as “quite simple software”, but with big visions came a need for a bigger skillset. She learnt from the best, and had a studio session with Basement Jaxx where they mentored her and guided her through their process; “They’re two of the loveliest men ever. They were very pivotal in my learning. I went in there to make beats and songs with them, but I ended up leaving by just seeing their creative process and style and picking their brains…I ended up sampling them. I don’t want to leak how they work, but just seeing how they reach certain sounds or develop ideas was really interesting.”

She credits her collaborators, past and present, as being figures that have helped her find her own sound, style and process as a musician and producer. Pink has worked with Mura Masa on several occasions, including on their 2022 collaboration ‘bbycakes’ with Lil Uzi Vert and Shygirl - which reimagines the 2004 UK garage hit ‘Baby Cakes’ by 3 of a Kind and injects it with hyperpop’s airiness. Mura Masa also produced one of her breakout 2021 hits, ‘Just for Me’, and joined her to co-produce 2022 single ‘Boy’s A Liar’, which has since gone on to become one of her biggest hits and has a popular remixed version featuring Ice Spice.

“Mura Masa’s whole music making process is born out of the genius in his head. You can’t really learn from someone like him because he’s making it in real time but he’s making it super quick. You can learn how to be a better producer but you can’t learn how to be a genius. You can’t learn the innate way of music making that sounds amazing from the jump. But I get inspired from watching these people - especially Danny L Harle - and he’s one of the best mentors I’ve ever had. I love him!”

Her biggest takeaway from making this project? She wants to become better at pushing herself out of her comfort zone, whether that’s making her tracks longer than a couple of minutes — a musical characteristic she is now defined by and even poked fun at for among lighthearted fanbase memes — or pushing the boundaries of the way the dance and pop music worlds can collide. “I personally don’t go in the studio unless I have a vision of what I kind of want,” she admits. “I used to go in and be free-wheeling, but my biggest flaw I’d say as a musician is that I’m very hard to convince. If I have an idea, it would be hard to persuade me to go against it. A lot of producers may struggle with me in the studio because I’m quite stubborn.”

A lot of her self-restriction comes from being bound and categorised by others - something that she has felt throughout her whole career, especially since breaking into the mainstream. “I think a lot of people also categorise me as just pop, but I think I’m fairly experimental and could go even further,” she reflects.

“If people listen to just my bigger songs and less of my deep cuts they think I’m less experimental than I actually am. However, on the other side, I never go too experimental. I’m very structured and I tend to stick to what I know a lot of the time. You know, for example, people tell me to make longer songs and I’m not against the idea but for me it’s about making it make sense for me. I go in with an idea of what I want. I’m someone that has OCD, and when I go against something that I have set in my brain on sometimes it feels like the world is going to end. It’s something I have to figure out as I make more music, because I struggle to break out of a vision.”

She’s curious to see how her fans respond to the next project, given the divergence in reception to ‘to hell with it’ and ‘Heaven Knows’. “I feel like I had quite different fan bases for my two first projects,” she says. “My first project was more gritty and DIY so had a much younger fanbase who liked that, whereas my album was more appreciated by proper music nerds who appreciated the cleanliness or mixing. It was cool to see that versatility. But I always love the grittiness and the DIY, and for this upcoming project I asked the mixers to not make it too clean because I like the way my voice sounds when it’s not too polished.”

When she first released music and became known for her breakbeat-pop, she says she encountered tensions from dance music purists who were questioning the authenticity or genuineness of her intentions to make electronic music. “It was a bit annoying…getting questions as to why I’m making art, some people were questioning if I knew the genre and did my research, I guess because I’m young,” she starts to explain.

“But I spoke to one of these jungle purists - and it was very interesting hearing his side of things and how he felt about drum ‘n’ bass and jungle and his introduction to me. [He spoke about how] drum ‘n’ bass is still not a mainstream genre, globally, and it’s not one that’s understood by the majority of the world. It was something that was honed in the UK, and with us as a nation where maybe some of our music was overlooked in the past, it makes these genres extra special to the people who have loved it. Some people don’t feel the need for these genres to be spread around the world or on a platform like TikTok, because they see it as something we birthed here so we want it to stay here. But they understood that music has always spread, but now because of social media it's making it easier to spread. Those purists have now accepted the situation for what it is.”

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Keeping the Black, British history of genres such as jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, and garage credited and acknowledged is imperative for Pink. She wants to make it clear who she is sampling, which acts she takes inspiration from, and, during interviews and online, she shouts out the pioneers who came before her and made these genres exist and usable in different contexts — whether that be Adam F, Shy FX, or Wookie. She even makes a point of acknowledging her contemporaries such as Nia Archives, who she calls a “great inspiration”, due to their influence on the way dance music is moving in the 2020s.

Beyond finding her place within dance music, Pink has had to come to terms with becoming a global popstar. While she started making her dance-laced pop music out of her love for the UK legends she’s been naming throughout our conversation, from Lily Allen to Shy FX, her global audience and their perception of who she is was an unexpected weight on her shoulders. “Being a ‘popstar’ or being in the public eye can definitely make you lose yourself,” she admits. “I am somebody who knows myself down to the bone but I’m telling you, being a singer makes it so easy to think about what people think or want to hear and it makes you lose elements of your beginnings.”

Part of this is learning how to deal with other people having an opinion on who she is and what her character or personality is. “A lot of my career has been people telling me their perception of me rather than me saying who I am,” she says. She gets called ‘aunty’ for her sassy y2k looks, and has, unintentionally, made herself a style niche. Currently favouring tartan prints, she winked at the nickname with some similarly styled older women invited to vibe with her during an appearance at New York's The Lot Radio (where a new Basement Jaxx-sampling track was also previewed).

At another point Pink gained a reputation for always having a handbag on her and taking it on stage. In 2022, a TikTok user posted a video of her performing with the text: “When you have a concert at 8 but need to run errands at 9”. She responded playfully to this too recently, posting a video of her dancing to promote her new bassline-driven track, set to be released this week, where she joked about beating the “no stage presence allegations”. The comments underneath jested at her usual style choices, and included “she put her bag DOWN for this”.

She laughs when asked about this, and reiterates that it’s never an intentional way to make people perceive her a certain way, she just turns up how she is. “Even me wearing my bags, it was never intended for people to make an assumption about me based on ‘the bag’...some of my favourite artists are just authentic, they may appear super quirky and you think they’re putting it on but no this is just them. This is what they’re like, they don’t put things on for the gimmick's sake.”

A myth she is keen to bust is that she’s an overly emotional or hypersensitive person, which she admits is an easy thing to conclude if you only listen to her tracks where the lyrics often are melancholic or introspective. “Generally as a human, I don’t take things too seriously,” she says while explaining that she doesn’t speak about her emotions too much and compartmentalises her feelings. “I’ve always been like this. I have the choice, and I’ve learned that I can time my emotions. I wait for a good time to show and express emotions and I don’t do it when it's inconvenient for me. That’s something I’m lucky to have and not everyone is able to have that ability. But it is something I had to learn, because I used to crash out. And crashing out isn’t good.”

Being in the studio is the time she allocates herself to tap into her emotions and process the things that are happening in her life. It gives her the chance to separate herself from her artistry, while also being able to authentically show people who she is.

“I have OCD but it doesn’t make me sad it just makes me overthink, however these overthinking things aren’t always bad. For me the only time I tap into emotional parts of myself is in the studio. I don’t go to therapy, I’m not necessarily the most open with my emotions…funnily enough the most open I am with my emotions is in interviews like this, or in my music. These are my opportunities to speak about myself in my most open way. I don’t write lyrics unless I’m in the emotional space of the studio where I know these things will be me basically vomiting the words out on a page.”

Pink has spoken before about not listening to much music outside of the studio, which she has received criticism for from the public. In an interview with Kids Take Over in July last year, she admitted that she doesn’t really listen to albums, which got people riled up to the point where she addressed it on Twitter: “there is no right or wrong way to consume or make music,” she wrote.

“Once I said I don’t listen to albums and I was met with ‘Oh how do you even do this?’ and blah blah blah, but as a person I’m super simple. That doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent or clued up but I’m someone who knows what she likes and does what she likes.”

She saves her experimental music listening, where she sits with songs to learn from them and gain knowledge, for her studio sessions. But in the club, she’s open to listen and dance to whatever comes out of the soundsystem. “When I’m in the club, anything goes honey! There’s something about a music listener who believes their taste is above everyone else’s — it just drives me berserk. Like, babe, it’s such an unnecessary opinion to bestow. I certainly enjoy every facet of music, and there’s no genre off the table for me. I’m happy listening to something that’s not considered cool.”

As she continues to navigate her way around an industry notorious for chewing you up and spitting you out, Pink understands that keeping up her momentum is key; “I always think of what might be ahead of the curve,” she says. Above all, she’s grateful to have made it this far in and hammers home that, as music evolves, she wants to move with it and is trusting the process for now.

“I didn’t expect to still be here after this long,” she says. “But to say that I’m still here is pretty nuts, and that’s the part that gags me the most.”

In the meantime, it’s PinkPantheress, her tartan prints and 2-minute songs ready to enter a new era.

Aneesa Ahmed is freelance journalist, follow her on Twitter