It’s been two years since PinkPantheress released her debut album, Heaven Knows. And yet, despite its critical acclaim, PinkPantheress has not only remained largely out of the limelight, but has now opted to return with a mixtape rather than a “right proper” sophomore album. Called Fancy That, it serves as her second mixtape offering after 2021’s To Hell With It. The disparate titles suggest a noticeable divergence in tone, one that’s also manifested on the cover artwork for Fancy That, which features PinkPantheress in a crown befitting Queen Elizabeth (RIP) and a collaged background of flowers, lipstick, a feather and a signature red telephone booth (as seen only in the UK). Clearly, PinkPantheress wants to convey a more playful, “unserious” vibe. And yet, that belies the fact that she took this project perhaps more seriously than any other before it.
As she phrased it to Apple Music, “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.” Not that PinkPantheress ever seemed to shy away from doing so in terms of her musical stylings. Including what has now become her “calling card”: sampling from other songs. But not ones that anybody would ever expect. For PinkPantheress, the more “esoteric” (which most everything is to Gen Z), the better. That kicks off right away on the weed-centric first track, “Illegal.” Opting to incorporate the Dark Train remix of “Dark & Long” by Underworld (as popularized by Trainspotting), PinkPantheress reintroduces herself with the line, “My name is Pink and I’m really glad to meet you [no doubt Pink! would be irked by this]/You’re recommended to me by some people.” She then continues, as though paranoid after taking just one puff, “Hey, ooh, is this illegal?/Hey, ooh, it feels illegal/I’ve suffered quite a few times with paranoia.”
So while it initially sounds like she could be addressing her listener, the context starts to shift toward one in which she’s actually talking to her dealer, asking, “Oh, what’s your name?/I don’t know what I should call ya/Hey, ooh, here’s twenty for ya/Hey, ooh, we can hide around the corner, wow.” That “wow” speaking again to the profound effects that ganja has on her. Which is why “Illegal” is, as she dubbed it, her “weed diss track.” Not something that happens too often in the music world, and it’s refreshing to hear a less glamorized perspective on the drug that really isn’t “for everyone” (try as Snoop Dogg might to insist otherwise).
To boot, creating a musical subtext that alludes to a film that is so “pro-drug” lends an additional sense of irony to it. That, and a slight nod to Britney Spears, who once told the crowd while onstage during her Piece of Me residency (just before delivering a cover of Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About”), “It kind of feels illegal…” when pretending to reference singing into her microphone (instead of relying on the usual prerecorded vocals abetted by her headset). Though the implication was all about the illegality of her conservatorship. And, even for someone who was barely born at the height of Spears’ “supremacy” in the music industry, PinkPantheress can surely appreciate the weight of what Spears endured. Including her own paranoia about other people even smoking weed around her for fear she would fail a drug test and not be permitted to see her children. Of course, that’s a much different kind of paranoid vibe than what PinkPantheress conveys here.
The frantic sound of “Illegal” transitions into “Girl Like Me,” another up-tempo ditty with an electronic rhythm that comes courtesy of Basement Jaxx (and yes, per Mixmag, PinkPantheress “had a studio session with Basement Jaxx where they mentored her and guided her through their process”). Specifically, their 2001 hit, “Romeo.” And it’s a key phrase from said chorus that PinkPantheress interweaves within “Girl Like Me” as she repeats, “Let it all go” five times. This mantra, for PinkPantheress, is used as a means to remind herself of a broken relationship, and that she’s no longer “a fan of the way we’re movin’/No hesitation when I remove this/Photograph from my home, I have things to take from.” In other words, she’s “so moved on.” Especially because she’s presently reflecting on how she “never liked it when you’d do me like that.” And the way he’d “do her” (unfortunately, not sexually) was by being the first to let it all go. All sense of emotional investment or caring. Thus, she, in turn, must do the same.
And, having “let go,” the theme of the next song, “Tonight,” is appropriately more hopeful in terms of the prospect of “enjoying” someone new. With a slightly slower tempo than “Girl Like Me,” Fancy That’s lead single was the first glimpse into the decided Britishness of the record, with PinkPantheress incorporating a Bridgerton motif for the Charlotte Rutherford-directed video. Sampling a brief moment from the beginning of Panic! at the Disco’s “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” (and arguably Britney Spears’ “Do You Wanna Come Over?”), the briefly “tranquil” instant then dives into PinkPantheress’ usual frenetic pacing (at least for this particular mixtape). One in keeping with the direct sentiments behind such lyrics as, “You want sex with me?/Come talk to me” and “You’re hot, on fire, that’s why I’m going tonight.” And yes, many a lady of “the Ton” probably felt the same way about a certain man before going to a ball during the “mating season.” The type of man with “star quality,” as it were.
Speaking of stars, that’s the title of the track that follows, serving as PinkPantheress’ second use of the 2007 single from Just Jack, “Starz in Their Eyes” (she also sampled from it, with a more musical emphasis, on “Attracted To You”). For “Stars,” PinkPantheress favors interweaving Just Jack’s lyrics rather than his music, including the verse, “And it’s a long way to go from a private bedroom dance routine/And Saturday night’s drunken dreams.” A rather prescient remark in 2007—almost as if Jack Allsopp could foresee the advent of “TikTok virality” through dancing. In any case, PinkPantheress chooses to interweave her own cautionary tale into the song—not about fame, but, once again, weed. This done as she sings, “You’re having bad, bad thoughts, items hidden in your drawer/And you don’t know how long you’ll keep on fighting this for/Check the mattress on the bed, it’s your name that’s being said/Or maybe you’ll just name the other person instead.”
To further play up her sense of paranoid terror, PinkPantheress adds in a bridge that’s just her talking to a dealer, the exchange over the phone being, “Hello?/Hey/Yeah, I’m gon’ be there in ten minutes, make sure you’ve got the stuff/I don’t have any of your stuff/Don’t test me, you know I can’t talk about this on cell phone, got it?/Oh my god, whatever/If it turns out you the cops, we’re done doing business, later.” The rather “old-timey,” almost PSA-sounding depiction of this illicit drug deal is in keeping with PinkPantheress’ overarching innocence and naïveté. A quality that stems from growing up with the kind of strict parents that still make her fearful of singing about sex and drugs in her music. No wonder weed makes her so paranoid. That, and well, there’s still very much a criminalizing attitude toward marijuana in the UK (perhaps PinkPantheress should consider a move to California—especially since she seems so inexplicably fond of being “Stateside”).
However, despite the chorus being driven by a state of weed-induced horror, PinkPantheress isn’t off-base when she asserts, “Things are getting darker in the city/Please find your way out of the city/Describe your love out of the city/It’s getting darker in the city.” And yet, it still hasn’t stopped many a broke ass from not only moving to said milieu, but remaining there as well. Lucky for PinkPantheress, she was already born and raised close enough to London, her launching pad toward fame as much as TikTok. And, having been discovered so quickly, it’s natural for PinkP to have the same push-and-pull sentiments about being mainstream versus fringe (much like Charli XCX). Accordingly, in discussing the nature of this record, PinkPantheress also told Apple Music, “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician. And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” But Fancy That might decide in favor of her mainstream success whether she truly wants to be an “unsung hero” or not.
Giving us a brief “Intermission” (at twenty-four seconds with a “Whoa, I’m hella fucked up” sound, courtesy of Aksel Arvid), PinkPantheress says softly at the end of it, “Let’s switch the vibe a little.” She doesn’t exactly do that with “Noises,” which feels like a natural progression of “Intermission.” This time sampling from Nardo Wick’s “Who Want Smoke?” (and definitely improving on it with a more drum n’ bass sound à la Lily Allen), PinkPantheress commences with another fear-laden verse that goes, “I guess I got it wrong, today is not my holiday/I steal the show from them, no matter what them people say/I, I got it from the man, but I forgot to pay/I feel like he won’t care about it anyway/I’m home alone, I’ll do just what I wanna do/I hear someone knock my door, but now I’m in the nude/But my parents said that they would be returning soon/I think I hear some noises from my living room.” Once again speaking to how deeply entrenched a fear of her parents (and their disapproval) is, PinkPantheress conveys the spirit of a teenage girl still afraid of getting caught doing something “naughty” (even if it’s as innocuous as not wearing clothes).
And through her weed-coated haze, she has to ask, “Am I hearing things, or is that someone there?” It’s a question that proves PinkPantheress wasn’t lying when she mentioned during a Reddit AMA, “The last time I smoked weed I ended up with my vision appearing in time lapse form, I was hearing myself speak before saying the words and I thought I was having a fit.” For most people, that would actually be a selling point to smoke it, but not so for PinkPantheress—or so she claims.
But perhaps weed is exactly what’s needed to help calm her nerves after the loss of a friendship (whether platonic or not). One dissected on “Nice to Know You” (again, there’s a certain Lily Allen quality to PinkPantheress’ music on Fancy That—here, it reminds one of Allen’s theme on “No Friend of Mine”). And yes, of course she keeps the “obscure” samples coming. This time, with William Orbit’s 2006 song, “Spiral,” featuring Kenna and Sugababes (also using the chorus, “Nothing’s really sane, but everything’s amazing/Slowly taking over me/Baby, have you noticed the sky is rearranging?/And slowly moving me?” for her own purposes).
For those who might be “irritated” with PinkPantheress’ Tourette’s-like need to sample, she explained it best to Mixmag when she said, “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.”
Clearly, she ain’t lyin’ about not doing it for “nostalgia-bait” purposes, as “Spiral” isn’t exactly a mainstream hit of the 2000s. Indeed, PinkPantheress herself remarked, “If anyone can clock the sample at first listen I’ll be very shocked and very surprised happily.” Of course, she ends up biffing her false aura of “erudition” by adding, “William Orbit, he was the guy that produced for Britney Spears a lot. Madonna, ‘Frozen,’ ‘Ray Of Light,’ so I feel like a lot of Sugababes fans won’t probably know that they had a song with William Orbit.” Um, first of all, Orbit only produced one song for Britney, the little-loved “Alien” from 2013’s also little-loved Britney Jean. Secondly, Orbit is so much more than “the guy who produced Ray of Light.” After all, he became known to Madonna through the music he made in the late eighties. As she told Q magazine (RIP) when Ray of Light first came out, it was the Strange Cargo album series that initially caught her ear. Enough for her to sanction some remixes of “Justify My Love” and “Erotica” from Orbit before giving him the big full-on producer job in 1997. So yes, PinkPantheress shows her Gen Z a bit too much at times (even whilst defending against certain detractors in that same Mixmag interview, “…some people were questioning if I knew the genre and did my research, I guess because I’m young”). But she makes up for it by winning the listener over yet again with “Stateside,” the song she’s declared to be her favorite from Fancy That.
Even if favoring a song about having a taste for Americans is something of a political hot potato right now. And yes, that word “hot” (as in, “Maybe you could be my American hot, hot boy”) is the main characteristic that PinkPantheress speaks to in terms of why she’s so allured by American men (obviously, she’s never been to the parts of the U.S. that showcase the obesity epidemic in all of its glory, instead presenting Abercrombie & Fitch model types in the accompanying video).
The amorousness (read: horniness) of “Stateside” segues seamlessly into “Romeo.” And while one might have thought she would call “Girl Like Me” that since it samples from Basement Jaxx’s song of the same name, instead, she chooses to sample from another B. Jaxx single on the mixtape’s finale. Namely, “Good Luck.” A song during which Lisa Kekaula’s vocals goad, “Tell me, tell me/Is life just a playground?/Think you’re the real deal, honey?/And someone will always look out for you?/But wake up, baby/You’re so totally deluded/You’ll end up old and lonely/If you don’t get a bullet in your head/Good luck, good luck/Good luck in your new bed/Enjoy your nightmares, honey/When you’re resting your head.”
These lyrics are hardly “romantic,” and yet, PinkPantheress does what she does best: subverts her own song’s meaning by conjuring memories of what the original’s lyrics say. So while PinkP (with a dash of Say Anything… imagery) might sound enamored when she sings, “Radio/You play your favorite song through your speakerphone/And still, I feel you through all your audio/Despite your biggest efforts to turn it off/You’re my Romeo,” the use of “Good Luck” infers she knows that this particular Romeo is liable to be a disappointing cad. So it is that she also notes, “Step one, don’t let yourself fall in love/‘Cause that is not fun.” Unless, of course, it serves as later inspiration for a song.
And, like the beloved play that Romeo stems from, it’s all heart-eyes and kisses for PinkPantheress at first, as showcased during the chorus, “You’re my Romeo/Everybody laughs when I told him so/I feel like it’s magic, Romeo/You’re all I can imagine, imagine/You’re my Romeo/Always sayin’ something to throw me off/I feel like it’s magic, Romeo/You’re all I can imagine, imagine.” However, PinkP wouldn’t be a “modern bard” if she didn’t give Romeo his proper sadboy spin by delivering a flipping-the-script verse on unrequited love that goes, “It’s only you that fell in love, on your knees, and you’re looking up/Romeo, yes, I know that you’ve had enough/Only one of us fell in love/So there’s nothing to discuss/You can fall in love with boys and girls and in between/So I promise that you shouldn’t waste your time on all of me.”
It’s a very “evolved” take on the classic tragic romance, written by another Brit who was (and is) seen as an emblem of the country. Perhaps after Fancy That, PinkPantheress is one step closer to being seen in the same favorable light.
[…] Listeners (British and Otherwise) Are Sure to Fancy PinkPantheress’ Fancy That […]