This article was originally published by The Bite on Nov. 8, 2021

If the”‘lo-fi beats to study to” girl had a 15-minute-long Boiler Room set, it would easily blend in with the UK producer’s signature sound. 

“She created a musical category by herself”: the PinkPantheress vibe. 

She calls it “new nostalgic,” and that’s exactly what it is. Borrowing from the past and adding a modern and fresh twist to it, the PinkPantheress vibe emulates low-rise bedazzled jeans, stories from uni about underground raves and MySpace profiles. Her sound brings Y2K nostalgia to an audience too young to remember the early-mid 2000s. 

Her debut mixtape “to hell with it” stands as the hypothesis of the fresh and nostalgic sound that led the 20-year-old singer-producer PinkPantheress to gather online attention.

With over two million videos using the track “Just for Me” on TikTok and several thousand using her other songs, PinkPantheress struck gold on the short-form video app — and it wasn’t by coincidence.     

The bite-sized songs in the record don’t try to prove a point, they simply put it on the table. Each track, none longer than two and a half minutes, presents a different snippet of the distinctive PinkPantheress sound without feeling the need to build on, elaborate or justify itself. In its entirety, the 18-minute-long mixtape gives the listener a sample of the producer’s palette and the influences that define her nostalgic sound. 

Building up from the foundation set by 90s UK electronic dance music subgenres like drum ‘n’ bass, UK garage and jungle, PinkPantheress introduces classic cuts to her Gen Z audience through samples all throughout the project. “Pain” directly borrows from the genre that most evidently influences PinkPantheress’ sound by sampling the 2000 UK garage hit “Flowers” by Sweet Female Attitude. Other samples include Crystal Waters’ house classic “Gypsy Woman” on “I Must Apologize,” and Linkin Park’s “Forgotten” on the angsty “Last Valentines.” 

With all the mentioned samples and influences, one thing stands: they were probably released very shortly after the producer was born. While not a lot is known about PinkPantheress’ identity, which she has purposefully kept private and separate from her work, she is known to have been born in Bath, England in 2001. At its simplest, she replicates the nostalgia for an era she didn’t get to live in.

Hazy and detached, nostalgia is the liminal space where the PinkPantheress vibe resides. It sounds like something you heard before somewhere, sometime, in a past moment you can’t quite recall.  

This nostalgia plays into a broader trend within the online cultural landscape. The early 2000s are to TikTok in 2021 what the late 1970s were to Tumblr in 2014 — a distant, distorted imaginary memory that only exists in the minds of teenagers craving a seemingly simpler time to project onto. The space that once was occupied by American Apparel and the 1975 now has Depop resellers and PinkPantheress. Nostalgia provides a sense of familiarity that, for an audience coming of age in the middle of a pandemic, a climate crisis and a hyper-intrusive social media landscape, feels comfortable and safe. 

Through both the nostalgic sound and anecdotal lyrics, “to hell with it” feels like gossiping about your 8th-grade crush through a bedazzled flip phone. The narrative lyrics tell stories of failed relationships, obsessive crushes, feeling lonely and growing up. Confessional in nature, PinkPantheress portrays the level of sensitivity you would expect from a teenage coming-of-age movie protagonist. In a TikTok, she even explains that writes sad lyrics in a “studious, unlucky in love main character in a y/n x Harry x Zayn Wattpad love story way.”  

The PinkPantheress vibe isn’t a new invention, but it also isn’t just its influences. The producer doesn’t try to hide her UK garage, jungle and DnB influences. Listening to genre classics like Tom & Jerry’s “Maximum Style,” Wookie’s “Scrappy” and Dillinja’s “Silver Blade” you can easily identify the foundations from which she creates her sound — the basslines, breakbeats, chopped up samples — while also noticing how she makes it her own. 

Her vocal performance and production set her apart and add a layer of uniqueness to the nostalgic and otherwise familiar sound. Almost robotic at times, the production sounds as if she chops off the end of her syllables, creating a staccato sound that is paired with an occasional monotone vocal delivery focusing more on being rhythmic than melodic. This is then contrasted by lyric-less hooks that strictly follow melodies, such as in “Pain” and “I must apologise.” 

‘to hell with it’ illustrates a progression in the DIY music realm from the Clairo-esque bedroom pop that emerged around 2017 to an EDM-focused era of experimentation and reimagination. Some aspects remain the same: simple production created in college dorms and childhood bedrooms, the Soundcloud demos that circulate among online communities and the overarching unconceited attitude that defies gatekeepers and purists. It also reflects the broader genre-blurring trend of mixing influences and sounds to create unique vibes rather than defined subgenres. 

So, what is the PinkPantheress vibe? In short, it’s soft, hazy, Gen-Z- and TikTok-friendly Y2K nostalgia in a two-minute package. Maybe, the PinkPantheress vibe signals a future understanding of music where genre labels become progressively less defined and specific vibes and moods are used to define distinct sounds and styles.