PinkPantheress: Fancy That album review — figurehead of Gen Z pop knows how to tell a story
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PinkPantheress, aka Victoria Walker, is lauded as a figurehead of Gen Z pop. Her songs are shaped by a culture of screen time and smartphones. Beats scroll by while the UK singer lightly croons her thoughts, as though composing a voice note. Changes in tempo or emphasis are made with an abrupt swipe. Tracks are over in two or so minutes, at once breezy and busy.
TikTok was her launch pad: she gained 1mn followers within a year of first posting as PinkPantheress in 2020. Traditional music industry exposure came with a major label deal and big hit single, “Boy’s a Liar Pt 2”. In 2023, she released her debut album, Heaven Knows, featuring longer songs. Meanwhile, live shows went from sketchy affairs where the singer seemed to have accidentally wandered on stage holding her handbag to large-scale gigs involving dancers and backing musicians.
Her new release Fancy That reverts to a more casual approach. Billed as a mixtape rather than a full-fledged follow-up to her album, its nine tracks last just over 20 minutes. They illustrate ideas expounded in an interview that went viral last year, when PinkPantheress treated conventional song structures as antiquated (“We don’t need to repeat a verse, we don’t need to have a bridge”). Her words provoked a bemused reaction from Dionne Warwick, who tweeted a question mark in response, like a senior manager confronted by the lax working habits of a young colleague.
But PinkPantheress’s ethos is less carefree than it seems. Fancy That brings a sharper, more powerful quality to her sound, like the latest model of a smartphone. The 1990s and 2000s musical references that run through her music are neatly arranged and chosen. “Illegal” samples Underworld’s “Dark and Long”, which is used in Trainspotting’s soundtrack, for a dizzy tale of halfhearted drug experimentation. “Girl Like Me” makes use of Basement Jaxx’s classic anthem “Romeo” to accompany verses about mismatched romance. “Stateside” is a Y2K dance-pop throwback about a fantasy transatlantic hook-up. Verses are jettisoned and bridges are burned, but the tradition of storytelling in song is well served.
★★★★☆
‘Fancy That’ is released by Warner Records UK
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