UK singer-songwriter PinkPantheress’ studio debut “Heaven Knows” opens with the sound of electric cathedral organs on the first track “Another life,” featuring Nigerian artist Rema.
It’s a pleasant track, it’s tight synthwork, subtle breakbeat percussion, and surprise guitar solo making clear what PinkPantheress does best; hooks. Even on her earliest tracks, which often were barely two minutes long, she had a remarkable talent for having musical ideas that could be absolute earworms.
Although she had been releasing music under the PinkPantheress name since 2020, real name Victoria Walker found success in 2021 thanks to her single “Pain,” which peaked at 35 on the UK singles chart. This was thanks to it going viral on the social media app TikTok. This virality was sparked at first from a dare, as she explains in an interview with Billboard journalist Damien Scott. She had told a friend that she could crack TikTok’s algorithm, which she eventually did.
“Once I figured out the algorithm, I was like, ‘Well, surely this would be able to blow up the music, too,” she told Billboard. And blow up it did, as “Pain” quickly became a sound used thousands of times on the platform. PinkPantheress is one among many social-media-savvy pop stars that have helped sky-rocket their music to virality on platforms like TikTok or YouTube.
Some may recall Lil Nas X’s similar albeit much larger breakthrough with his genre bending hit “Old Town Road.” Two years later, PinkPantheress released her studio debut off the back off of her own surprise smash hit “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2.” Like any true artist of the internet age, boundaries between genres are completely blurred. PinkPantheress’ melodies and harmonies recall 1990s RnB, but her songs are often driven by these jittery and fast drums that are inspired by the UK’s jungle and 2-step dance scenes from the 1990s and 2000s.
That isn’t to say that all of her tracks on “Heaven Knows” sound the same. The most consistent genre is dance, but the album goes to a lot of places soundwise. There’s hip-hop drill styled percussion on “Nice to meet you” and “Bury me,” featuring Central Cee and Kelela respectively. And then there is something like “Ophelia,” which has a much more natural and almost rock sounding drums. They rub right up against the main melody played on a digital harp, accented with these beautiful synth tones.
Combine that with PinkPantheress’ competent pop songwriting, and you’ve got someone who’s grown to be a master of an aesthetic. There’s something undeniably retro sounding about her music, at times analog but also recalling the early internet age.
It makes sense why she blew up on TikTok initially; it’s a place where people are hungry for nostalgia for times that they often didn’t live through.
Where decades blend together, creating looks and sounds that seem more like scrapbooks of polaroids and old JPGs. Although pedestaled as a self-described “internet cutesy teen-pop girl” in the aforementioned Billboard interview, “Heaven Knows” shows remarkable growth for PinkPantheress. She has fleshed out her sound from her early hits, even simply in how the songs now have runtimes spanning between two and four minutes. While I am unsure if she’ll find true mainstream success, the internet has grown to become a place where an artist like her can truly flourish and find a cult following.
Even then, she still thinks her writing is pop-friendly regardless. “What I’ve realized is that my natural way of writing is more pop-friendly than anything,” she told Billboard.
“So even though the beats can be kind of alternative, I still write in a very standard structure. And I make sure all the lyrics are tangible.
And because of that, I think that it has made the [music] that I’m doing very accessible to mainstream audiences.” PinkPantheress is a shining example of why the present day can be exciting for music. Genres boundaries have broken down, and anyone who knows their way around pop-song structures and social media algorithms could have a song at the top of the charts.
