Name: PinkPantheress
Age: 20
Hometown: Bath, England
Currently Lives: In London, with a group of childhood friends.
Claim to Fame: PinkPantheress is a singer, songwriter and producer whose melancholic yet upbeat track “Just for Me” has been featured in more than 2.1 million TikTok videos, becoming a kind of soundtrack for Gen Z angst and longing. Sample lyric: “My diary’s full of your name on every page.” Her music stitches elements from drum and bass, as well as garage. “A lot of my beats are literally from the early 2000s and late ’90s,” she said. “I think a lot of people probably have heard them before without realizing.”
Big Break: PinkPantheress has been creating music since she was 14, when she joined a rock band. On Christmas Day last year, she posted a snippet of her song “Just a Waste,” which samples Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” to TikTok. The following day, she said, she was flooded with requests for the full-length version and the song has been featured in more than 216,000 TikTok videos. “My first TikTok was just to gauge if I should put out a song,” she said. “This is a great way to assess if music is good enough to put out or not.’”
Latest Project: On Oct. 15, PinkPantheress released “To Hell With It,” her debut mixtape of 10 songs, which Jon Caramanica, pop music critic for The New York Times, calls “warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy.” “I think a lot of my music doesn’t come from a place of pain or whatever,” she said. “It doesn’t come from a place of me. A lot of it just comes because I really like storytelling.”
Next Thing: With most pandemic restrictions lifted in London, she plans to perform at a few shows this month, including the Cause. She also hopes to explore a wider array of music. “Music-wise, I do want to flesh it out a bit,” she said. “I definitely want to do more genres, or try at least.”
Mum’s the Word: Despite, or maybe because of, her large social media following (one million on TikTok), PinkPantheress has tried to keep her legal name secret, though some music fan sites say that they have identified her. “I always was private, not because I’m standoffish or I don’t want to have that intimacy with people — it’s just more because it’s hassle free,” she said. “I really enjoy leaving things up to people’s imagination.”
