From its title onwards, to hell with it is a melancholic and teenage take on heartbreak. Like her emo influences My Chemical Romance and Paramore, she’s in the business of misery. Imagine the resonance when you hum or breathily sing along to your favourite songs, that airy sound of the vibrations in your skull. You’re left with the feeling of having heard a familiar incantation.
They have the energetic signature of a melody looping once or twice until its magic has fizzled out by approximately the two-minute mark. All of her sample-based tracks work like a conjured spell. It’s perhaps no coincidence that PinkPantheress gravitated toward the only two games that involved her participation using other people’s pop music. She’s just nonchalantly patting on a drum with the sticks, oblivious to everything else. She doesn’t look to see if anyone is returning to play with her. As we start to make our exit to a Starbucks over the road, I’m nearly up the stairs and out of the building when I turn around to find she has wandered off to a drumming game called Wadaiko Master. She gives little away in the arcade and, like her hazy persona, seems to exist in a distant and referential world of her own. Between dances she does what she does every 30 seconds throughout the duration of our time at the arcade: retrieves her phone from her pocket and flicks through TikTok videos using her long, pale, pink nails. She dances on the blue and pink squares, barely moving her long limbs at all. It’s saccharine with the vigour of a show tune. For the best of three, she picks another K‑pop track: Orange Caramel’s Magic Girl. I pick a fun, deranged club number which sounds like it belongs to her current collaborator and mentor, Danny L Harle. By the second round, despite both of us stubbornly refusing to take off our jackets, we’ve loosened up. She wins our battle yet seems unbothered to have done so. On the dance machine she taps a foot against the arrow pads to pick Shock, an edgy song by South Korean boyband Beast. It’s out there if you want to look for it but it’s not: ‘Oh, that’s what PinkPantheress looks like,’” she says, grinning. “What’s weird is that I don’t think my face is necessarily out there still. If you want to see what she looks like today (“face” is the first additional term that comes up in Google Images when you search her name), study the cover of her October mixtape, to hell with it, her social media avatars or the pages of this shoot. But most people still don’t know her real name (there is one now widely attributed to her on the internet, which she tells me is fake).Īnonymous and initially faceless, having not appeared clearly in the TikTok videos that launched her career, the plan was to build mystique while maintaining her privacy. In December she was nominated for a Brit and in January she won the BBC’s annual Sound Of poll (previous winners: Adele, Michael Kiwanuka, Celeste). When we meet, the public might be increasingly well-versed in PinkPantheress’ short, perfectly formed d’n’b‑shaped capsule tunes – her TikToks have 8.4 million likes, she has more than 6 million monthly Spotify listeners and some 40 million combined YouTube views. None of the teenagers in the busy Central London arcade recognise her, and that’s partly by design. I wouldn’t have recognised her as the most (justifiably) hyped artist of last year if I hadn’t been looking out for her. Her braids are pulled back into a low ponytail. She wears a pair of stonewash jeans with white Skechers, a metallic grey North Face jacket and has Bose over-ear headphones around her neck. But today PinkPantheress is dressed like the typical art school student that, away from the music industry buzz, she actually is – a ’00s girl living in a 2020s world. They match the almost-full moon eyes on a Victorian gothic face. The ethereal clothes she usually wears suit her: long skirts and flowing sleeves. “Oh my God,” the 21-year-old curses blankly, navigating herself like a ghost around excitable kids to get to her game choice: the dance machine.
The breakout talent of 2021 is a few inches taller than you might expect from her TikToks, and her movements are languid. There’s a remoteness to PinkPantheress as she floats past the neon machines of Soho’s Las Vegas Arcade. Taken from the new print issue of THE FACE.
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