PinkPantheress

PinkPantheress doesn’t do holidays. She tried, not so long ago, when she took a trip to Oualidia in Morocco. “And that was my last holiday. I’m not doing holiday again,” she says, laughing. It wasn’t the country — beautiful, amazing, she says — but “the actual experience. It was horrible. I got my tooth removed. Oh my. It was just such bad luck.” There is more to it than dental misfortune, however. Holidays are supposed to mean relaxation, and PinkPantheress, the pop star of the moment, does not feel as if she is at a point in her life where she can chill. “I haven’t felt relaxed in, genuinely, years,” she admits. Not since the moment she decided she was going to be a singer, when she was at an all-girls school in Kent. She is driven, ambitious and hard on herself. “I always feel like I’m missing something, and I need to be doing this and achieving this. I have such high standards for what I need to achieve. Everyone tells me, like, ‘No, you shouldn’t have such high standards.’ But it’s like, I kind of should, though, because that’s what drives you.” She pauses. “Personally, that’s my opinion.”

It is early July and the hottest day of the year. Unsurprisingly, Victoria Beverley Walker — Pink, or Vicky, depending on how well you know her — is hard at work, shooting a video for the Basement Jaxx-sampling fan-favourite song “Romeo”. Four days ago she ticked off a massive achievement, playing the show of her career at Glastonbury Festival. The heaving tent roared as she dropped her two-step smash hit “Illegal”, and soon the crowd was singing it back so loudly that you couldn’t hear her vocal.

It felt like a tipping point, taking the sound once described in Slate magazine as “music for the extremely online” and bringing it fully into the mainstream. Yet she had been so unsettled in the run-up that she had had to take a beta blocker before she went on stage. “I really thought I was going to be inconsolably nervous before and after, but I actually felt very calm,” she says, still basking in the afterglow. “I was way more at home than I thought I was going to be.” The 24-year-old has had to learn stagecraft quickly, because success has arrived in a series of rapid, sometimes overwhelming waves. She has been making and producing garage-inflected, 1990s-influenced, sample-heavy pop since her teens, on her laptop in her bedroom, with what she calls “an insanely basic set-up”.

She was 19 when she put out a snippet of “Just a Waste” on TikTok on Christmas Day 2020, obscuring her face with her phone, with the caption “day 2 of posting my song until someone notices it”. On day 11 she posted a clip of “Pain”, which would win her a record deal with Parlophone and become her first proper single. In February 2021 she teased “Attracted to You”, saying she had recorded a full version “during my Zoom lecture LOL”. She was studying film at University of the Arts London, though she stopped attending when pop stardom came calling and eventually dropped out. It was “Just for Me” which moved the dial. The British rapper Central Cee sampled it on the song “Obsessed with You”, and Coldplay performed a cover of it on BBC Radio 1. TikTok named it the “breakout track of the summer”, meaning it had the largest percentage increase in creators using it for videos. To date, it has had well over 200 million Spotify streams.

“She is one of the few artists to blow up on TikTok who has translated that into a proper career, because she’s got a genuinely innovative sound,” Laura Snapes, the deputy music editor of The Guardian, says. “Nostalgia plays well on TikTok, and she threads so much great dance-music history — often from before she was born or released in her infancy — through a bubbly, addictive sound that’s all her own, and in turn, that gives Gen Z a sense of ownership over a scene they didn’t live through.”

PinkPantheress now has 4.7 million followers and 57.5 million likes on TikTok. At the start of 2022 she won the BBC’s annual star-making Sound Of poll, joining alumni such as Adele, Keane and Haim. One mixtape and one album later, she hit the US Billboard top 10 with a remix of her 2022 single “Boy’s a Liar”, aided by a guest verse from the Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice. A song on the Barbie soundtrack soon followed. By the time of Fancy That, which arrived in May, PinkPantheress was primed for the big time.

Yet there has always been an air of mystery to Pink, and beneath that, a more complicated story. At first her elusiveness was deliberate. She cultivated a Frank Ocean-esque anonymity, and it was a long time before people learned her real name or what she looked like. It wasn’t until September 2021, when she released a video for “Just for Me”, which she co-directed using skills honed at film school, that she made her identity fully visible. Even now, there is a sense that she is still getting used to being front and centre, still a shy young woman adjusting to being PinkPantheress, the pop star. Right now, she is sitting in the middle of a giant black-and-white chess board, a queen in a red dress and red heels, mouthing the words to “Romeo”. (“There are a lot of chess players on my dad’s side,” she explains later. Her aunt Susan Lalic is a five-time British women’s chess champion, and though Pink occasionally played her cousins as a child, she says she was never that good.)

Dancers are buzzing around, dressed as marionettes in sashes of red and blue; after every take they run for the comfort of the huge industrial fans. The gravel-voiced “Messy” singer-songwriter Lola Young has dropped in to say hi, having met Pink that weekend at Glastonbury. The US R&B singer Destin Conrad sits on a director’s chair, ready to step in for his cameo as her Romeo. Pink comes over to chat. She stands beside a monitor; on the small screen, a close-up shot of her face loops and loops. It must be surreal to be standing next to herself. “I hate it,” she says lightly, smiling.

We first meet a couple of weeks earlier in another warehouse, housing rehearsal studios, on the opposite side of the city. Pink is there to begin working on her summer shows, and the prospect of Glastonbury looms large. “If you had offered me that two years ago, or even last year, I would be like, ‘No. I could never.’” She sits on a high stool at a mixing desk in a vest and tracksuit bottoms, picking at a Wagamama takeaway, crossing and uncrossing her ankles. She makes little eye contact and fidgets with her trainers. Eventually, both will be kicked off onto the floor. “Now, it’s like, OK, I have to push myself.” Does that mean she’s found the confidence? She thinks about it. “It’s like I have to push myself to receive the confidence,” she says finally. “I do feel like I can trust myself and get the job done.”

Pink was born in Bath and moved to Canterbury with her family when she was five. Her father is an academic, teaching statistics, and her mother, who is of Kenyan descent, worked as a carer. Her older brother works as a sound engineer, making software plug-ins. He didn’t get her into music, she says, but he did leave a lot of tempting equipment lying around the house, and she borrowed it to get herself started. “He made music and he did producing, but I found it on my own terms.”

Her independence is evident. She worked in supermarkets as a teenager, at one point holding down three jobs. She worked at Marks & Spencer and the Co-op to pay for her phone bill and her car. The economics of modern pop are complex and unforgiving. Musicians who make money earn from various sources, from brand deals to modelling, and, for some, music itself. Pink counts herself in the latter category. For her, songwriting and production are more lucrative than performing, although that also brings in an income. Now that she has more money, she keeps most of it in savings. “I don’t really touch it. Just because I have it, I don’t think that means I need to change my lifestyle.” Her car has not changed. She still lives in a flatshare in London with three friends, though she spends a lot of time in LA, where she sometimes shops in late afternoon at the fashionable grocery store Erewhon. “I would never live alone. There’s no reason to.” It’s not that she is trying to present herself as humble, she adds. It’s just what works for her.

Pink describes herself as “a critical music thinker”. She loves music, always has. When she was at school she was the singer in an all-female emo band; she reluctantly tells me that they were called the Second Decade. “It was really good to practise songwriting,” she says, tactfully. Looking back, were the songs any good? “Oh God, no. They were terrible.” She laughs. As she got older she discovered the music of the eclectic, genre-blending electronic producer Kaytranada and wondered if she could make music like that. She started playing around with the music creation app GarageBand in the hope of making beats for him. “I’d sing over them. It was a lot of experimentation.”

The spirit of experimentation has continued throughout her career. It is difficult to pin down her genre, as, like Kaytranada’s, it shifts, borrows and bends. She samples, mixes and matches; her tracks are short, sweet patchworks of various influences and ideas. “With Vicky, we went back and forth putting ideas in the pot and stirring until we had something delicious,” says the Dare, the so-hot-right-now producer who recently produced “Guess” for the deluxe edition of Charli XCX’s Brat, and with whom Pink became pen pals after they collaborated on her single “Stateside”. Her music might have a splash of Sugababes here, a sprinkle of the Streets there. She understands why people find it difficult to pin her down. “In the UK a lot of people would describe it as jungle or drum ’n’ bass, and I like those terms because they seem quite accurate. But there is a grey area, because a lot of my music is straight pop or Y2K. I’m obsessed with the idea of having my own ecosystem as an artist.” She clarifies. “It basically means that I exist in a place that no one can really penetrate. I enjoy the idea of being a bit of an outlier.” She smiles.

This summer TikTok users have been unable to escape her single “Illegal”, which turns her sometimes skittish sonic vision into a devastatingly precise and witty banger. Its opening couplet — “My name is Pink and I’m really glad to meet you / You’re recommended to me by some people” — has soundtracked countless clips of people shaking hands, often for comic effect, on social media. Like much of her output, it is deceptively casual, her voice breathy, high and light. Listen carefully, though, and the lyrics are about shame and paranoia; the influence of those early emo days remains firmly in place. “I wrote a lot of these songs about weed,” she told a Reddit Ask Me Anything earlier this year.

When Pink won the BBC’s Sound Of poll in 2022, some of the discourse centred around whether the songs were too short, too sample-heavy, catering too much to the whiplash attention spans of social media. Her debut mixtape To Hell With It was 18 minutes and 36 seconds long. Her first proper album, Heaven Knows, pushed 30 minutes, but with 2025’s Fancy That she has returned to her precision punchiness: it comes in at just 21 minutes. “I think it’s a sign of how novel she is that she inspires such ire,” says The Guardian’s Snapes.

Pink listens to the criticism. “People might be like, ‘I don’t understand; why do people like her music?’ I genuinely read that a lot,” she says. But she remains firm in her defence of her sound. In the late 2010s she was a big fan of rappers like Tierra Whack, whose debut album famously consisted of 15 one-minute songs, and Comethazine. “One minute 30 to two minutes max. And I remember thinking, Wow, this is so sick. I love the way that they’ve made their point so concisely, and the music is delivering and it makes me feel good, even in this short amount of time.” That’s not to say that Pink is closed to the possibility of future expansions. “I am becoming more aware that there are things I can do to make a song just as good with a longer length. And I do want to explore that in my next album, for sure. Not even to appease anybody, but more to see where I can grow.”

Pink, the music fan, believes in the perfect pop song. “I do. I think it’s just a song that you can listen to over and over, and you realise that you’ve never desired it to be different in any way.” There was a time, she says, when all the perfect pop songs came out one after the other. “Around the time of ‘Take Me to Church’ by Hozier, and Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used to Know’. One of the best times for music was that era. Every song was just perfect.” Pink is known for embracing late-1990s and early-noughties pop and garage, so it may be a surprise that to her, perfection comes in the form of slow-paced, indie-leaning, early-2010s ballads. But then again, she is a shapeshifter.

She is aiming for perfection herself. “I definitely am. I feel like it’s harder when it’s your own music, because I have a tendency to overthink, and when I overthink is when it can go from perfect to being not perfect any more.” She cooks, she says, so I ask her if it’s like adding too many ingredients: once you’ve done it, you can’t go back. “It’s a similar thing. And using that metaphor, it’s like having too many chefs in the kitchen.”

With every new release Pink has tried to outdo what went before. “Each time I try and take the advice of people, and I’ll apply that to the next thing, and then I’ll take that advice and apply it to the next thing.” Ever the overthinker, she explains that she doesn’t listen to every single comment, but if a theme emerges she starts to pay attention. “If it’s been stated a few times in a few reviews, I’ll be like, Oh, OK, fair enough.”

She is pretty good at taking criticism. “The only time I’m really bad at it is when it’s a boyfriend. Genuinely, that’s the only time I can’t,” she says. “I’d say that’s quite peak. When you date someone, you have an expectation that, like, they love absolutely everything you do, and so when they say something that suggests they don’t, it’s really hard. ‘But you’re meant to love my flaws!’” Actually, she says, she would also feel sad if her fans criticised her. “You work hard to get their trust, so if that turned to them saying, ‘We expected better from you,’ then that really scares me.” What if the next single was, say, 15 minutes of death metal? “Hmmm, maybe not. But if it does get to a point where I want to change genres, I like to think that they’d be there for the ride.”

In 2024, Billboard named Pink its female producer of the year; the award had gone to the Spanish art-pop polymath Rosalía in 2023. Many years ago, Björk spoke out about how often people gave men credit for her production and arrangements, because they couldn’t imagine that she had done them herself. Does Pink have to remind people she is a producer too? “Oh, 100 per cent,” she says, though she seems relatively sanguine about it. She says most people don’t care who has produced a song. Her longtime best friend is an estate agent and wouldn’t have a clue. “But among music fans and people that care about production, I try and remind them as much as possible, because I’d say my strengths lie in my production, and that’s where I started off.” It’s also good for representation, she adds. “There’s not many female producers in general.”

So far, Pink’s audience has leaned young, so much so that from the stage at Glastonbury she made a point of commenting on her youthful audience. In fact, the festival seemed to divide along age lines, with Pyramid Stage headliner Neil Young drawing a significantly smaller crowd than pop’s reigning monarch, Charli XCX, on the Other Stage. For the first time in many years, I suggest, people are making music that doesn’t appeal to every single generation, music older listeners might not get. “I do think so. A lot of my favourite artists, such as Basement Jaxx, are people that did have misunderstandings and critics and everyone saying that they didn’t like it at first. And then years go by and it’s like, ‘Wow.’” Pink smiles. “I’m not saying that in years to come people are going to be like, ‘Oh, she’s amazing, she’s a legend.’” It’s more that she knows what she’s doing, and she’s sticking to the plan. “I don’t think people realise there’s a power in an artist being so assured about their own process that they’re not willing to change it.”

Such confidence has been hard-won, and getting here has been far from straightforward. In August 2024, while on tour with Olivia Rodrigo in the US, Pink announced that she was cancelling all her forthcoming tour dates, including festival appearances and a support slot for Coldplay. She released a statement at the time explaining that she needed to “focus on my physical health and overall wellbeing”.

So what happened? “What happened was, I took myself out of that situation, because I had such fear of performing at that point, I knew that I was going to crash out if I had to keep going,” she says. She began to think that she would pass out on stage. She thought she would have to abandon the show, walk off mid-set, and she didn’t want to take that risk. I ask her if it was exhaustion or anxiety, and she says both. Usually, she says, she would work through mental exhaustion, but it was taking a toll physically. She had night terrors and would wake up sweating. When she took to the stage she would get dizzy. “I assume they were panic attacks. It took a toll on me. I started doing crazy shit. I started cutting my hair off, and I was like, I can’t do this any more. So it was everything. Every form of exhaustion.”

The obvious interpretation is that it was caused by the success that came practically overnight, catapulting her from laptop producer to pop star doing huge shows without any run-up to ease her in. “For that specific situation, it was a rapid ascent, going from not performing at all to performing in front of a large arena. I think it was also the pressure I was putting onto myself, and it was the travelling too.” She wasn’t taking proper care of herself, wasn’t eating well. “So I had to leave to look after myself.”

And Pink is used to looking after herself. “I try to complain as little as possible about my career. There’s no reason for me to sound ungrateful. However, sometimes you have to realise when it’s complaining and when it’s actually just doing yourself justice.” She might have been on a massive arena tour, but she started to ask herself how she would have behaved had it been any other job. “At the Co-op, when I had a bad day I would call in sick. So I thought to myself, What is different about this? If it’s something which is going to be detrimental to my future, then I should do something about it now rather than just wait for things to get worse.”

That revelation came only a year ago, but Pink is in another place now, a much better one. “One hundred per cent. Since then, we’ve put things in place to stop that happening again. Self-care, having a support system in place, of people that I can speak to to take the edge off.” At Glastonbury something shifted, though she isn’t quite sure what. “I genuinely wonder myself. I was saying this the other day to my friend. It’s strange. I can’t really say why. I feel more comfortable. But we’ll see when the tour begins, I guess.” She will play two nights at London’s Brixton Academy in September before touring the US and Canada in November.

We catch up for a final conversation a few days later, after Glastonbury and the “Romeo” video shoot, when Pink is in Toronto, Canada. She is not, she insists, on holiday. Of course she isn’t. “I’m still working. I’m making covers of my songs to put on YouTube.”

It has been four and a half years since PinkPantheress first posted her music online, on SoundCloud and TikTok. Success might have arrived quickly, but getting to a place where she feels at home with that success has taken its time. “Obviously, yes, my music did grow overnight,” she says. “But I think as an actual figure in music it’s still taking me quite a while to cement myself properly. Which I’m so fine with, by the way.” She has a clear idea of what cementing herself looks like. “I always describe it as just having enough cultural currency. And I really want to be able to be some person’s ‘Wow, she did it – I can do it too.’”