| Album | to hell with it |
| Artist | PinkPantheress |
| Released | 15 October 2021 |
| Highlights | Reason, Nineteen, Break it off |
| Lowlight | Last valentines |
| Undertone rating | 3/5 |
20-year-old student PinkPantheress shot to instant stardom in 2021 after her short and sweet garage tracks found a keen audience on social media. But does her debut mixtape live up to the hype? Alex Walden seems to think so.
So it’s 2021 and chances are you have the viral app TikTok on your phone which has completely taken over the internet for the past there years. If your ‘For You’ page is anything remotely similar to mine, you’ve probably heard of the rising star PinkPantheress, whose music is currently all over the platform right now. Her short snippets of an incredibly soft, high-pitched voice accompanied by sudden drum and bass style drum brakes and the occasional overly enthusiastic “hey” virtually took over the app with her sounds being used as background music for a variety of trends. After her debut single Break it off was eventually brought to streaming services, she quickly gained a huge following. Not long after her viral success, she released her biggest track to date, Pain, which is currently sitting at over 95 million plays on Spotify. It soon became hard to deny that PinkPantheress has the potential to become a huge breakout star. However, considering she had only recently grown to fame, I wondered if she would be able to grow past her current stage of making short and snappy songs and make a decent full-length project. Considering this, you could imagine my delight when I woke up one day to see that PinkPantheress had announced an album via her YouTube channel. Afterall, her songs may be short, but for that short period of time, you feel as if you’re taken to another world.
The Sound of the Album
It’s refreshing to hear a mixtape from a new age artist who still incorporates elements of music from an older time. It’s most definitely a new style of sound, hearing a soft voice glide over a melody smoothly despite having an incredibly strong foundation of heavy hitting garage drums or the occasional fast paced drum and bass breaks, yet I feel as if I’m not allowed to say that PinkPantheress takes a retro inspiration for her music due to the fact that when we think of retro music, we think around the 80s era styles such as disco or the rise of hip hop which took elements of soul and funk records to construct their melodies. We don’t think of garage or drum and bass – genres that became popular in England during the 90s – as a retro sound (maybe it’s just me feeling old). Somehow PinkPantheress has managed to put a new twist on retro-inspired music for me.
For a short period of time, you feel as if you’re taken to another world. It sounds like how I imagine comfort would feel like if you could feel music.
Listening to PinkPantheress feels like meeting an old friend for a day out or doing something you really enjoy in your spare time. It’s nice to be able to get away from everything for a while and just enjoy yourself without having to think about any possible hardships or worries you may have. Songs such as Break it off and Passion have a fast-paced pump feel which can get you hyped up for anything with a good pair of headphones, yet we also get songs such as All my friends know and Nineteen, which give an extremely calming vibe and serve as a nice soft end for the album to bring you back down to earth (that is if you ignore the sudden change of pace with the bonus track Break it off). However, despite PinkPantheress’ musical abilities, the album isn’t at all perfect.
As I said earlier, listening to Pink Pantheress is like a short and sweet escape to a realm of bliss, however that escape really is short. The average song length of this album is just 1 minute 51 seconds, that’s about half the length of most songs nowadays. Granted this project is only a mixtape, meaning that we shouldn’t treat this like a proper studio album. However, most mixtapes I listen to nowadays are usually about an hour long, yet this is less than 20 minutes. Don’t get me wrong, as soon as this project was announced, I knew it was going to be short, yet when I first listened to it, I remember hearing the first song come on again, and I was shocked that I had finished it so quickly.
Listening to PinkPantheress feels like meeting an old friend for a day out or doing something you really enjoy.
Despite her drum and bass and garage influences, PinkPantheress does try something new with her song Last valentines with a new more emo sounding track and a sampled loop from Linkin Park’s legendary Forgotten, yet despite this, the song just doesn’t hit as hard as the other tracks do in my opinion. It feels quite flat compared to the other songs. As well as this, it sounds as if there’s a slow drum break on the sample as well as another layer of fast paced drums layered on top. Now I’m all for layered drums, I think that they can give those songs that extra bit of power that they need to make it that slight bit better, yet on this track the clash between slower and fast paced drums sounds clumsy. As well as this, considering that it’s the only track on the mixtape in this specific style, it feels like an anomaly. This is a decent first attempt, yet she’s not fully there yet when it comes to making music of this specific sound.
Final Thoughts
Honestly, I really enjoyed this mixtape. There’s obviously the fact that this project is incredibly short but to be honest, you’re not really supposed to treat to PinkPantheress’ music like you would a normal full-length project (or any other work from any other artist to be honest). PinkPantheress makes music for you to jam out to and feel incredibly free for two minutes or so. While listening to this, you do get the feeling that it was made by a 20-year-old university student and not some major well established, multi-award-winning artist and that’s what I like about it. It sounds how I imagine comfort would feel like if you could feel music. Overall, this tape feels like a solid foundation to base the start of her career as she has some major strong points yet also some weak points that the can work on. PinkPantheress has also proved that she is willing to experiment with her sound slightly which shows that she is already beginning to experiment and grow as an artist. I can honestly say that I’m very excited to see what the future holds for her.
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