Fancy That: PinkPantheress Quietly Reigns

PinkPantheress makes heartbreak sound effortless on a mixtape that barely lets you in, but still lingers like a message you were never meant to read.

There’s something about PinkPantheress that feels impossible to pin down, and Fancy That only makes her more elusive—in the best way. When she first emerged, a faceless username uploading 30-second fragments to TikTok, it felt like the internet had conjured a pop star out of thin air—no image, no context, just grainy breakbeats and whispered heartbreak. It was thrilling: her voice floated over samples you half-remembered from school discos and MSN away messages, like a ghost of 2005 trapped in your phone. Even now, with sold-out tours, major co-signs, and polished visuals, she’s managed to hold onto that sense of flickering, accidental intimacy.

What’s clever about Fancy That is how it recognises that tightrope. It’s her most self-assured, funny, and effortlessly listenable project to date, but it never fully lets you in. The whole thing is over in less than twenty minutes. The lyrics still read like private confessions you weren’t meant to hear. And though the production’s glossier, there’s a playfulness in how she lets her influences bleed through—old indie sleaze tracks, pop-punk samples, warped garage beats—all stitched together with that glassy, unbothered vocal delivery that’s become her signature. It feels like she’s finally comfortable enough to evolve from the alt girl persona people tried to pin on her, while still making songs that’ll destroy you on the night bus.

Opener “Illegal” feels like a perfect starting point, repurposing Underworld’s “Dark & Long” into something shadowy and romantic. It’s one of those PinkPantheress tracks where it feels like you’ve known it for years after a single listen. The samples on this mixtape aren’t nostalgia-bait, though—they feel lived-in, like songs you’d find buried on an old MP3 player, and she makes them strange again. “Tonight,” with its sneaky Panic! at the Disco interpolation, is pure internet-pop giddiness, while “Stars” flips Just Jack’s “Starz In Their Eyes”—a cynical 2000s indie hit—into a melancholic, petty anthem about being fixated on someone you’ll never meet.

That’s maybe the best thing about this project: how petty it lets itself be. So much of early PinkPantheress was pinned to this idea of teenage heartbreak and bittersweet nostalgia, but Fancy That knows how ridiculous those feelings can be in hindsight. Tracks like “Stateside” and “Girl Like Me” sound like the giddy overthinking you do at 3 a.m., trying to convince yourself a stranger’s DM means something, or wondering if someone noticing your playlist means they’re obsessed with you. It’s embarrassing and funny and, sometimes, genuinely gutting—and she captures that without making it melodramatic.

What’s changed is how sharp she’s become about pop as a format. PinkPantheress has always made music that understood how the internet consumes songs now—short, looping, easy to overplay. But Fancy That isn’t chasing a viral moment. It’s not trying to re-break TikTok. If anything, it feels like a mixtape designed to soundtrack the quieter, slightly hungover parts of your week: getting ghosted by someone you don’t even like that much, romanticising a boy in a band who can barely play his guitar, overhearing a song in a shop and getting irrationally emotional. It’s the fleeting, dumb, strangely formative stuff that feels huge for a minute and then dissolves.

The production’s richer this time too, leaning heavier into indie sleaze references and glitchy pop flourishes without sanding down the messiness that makes her music work. You can tell she’s having fun with it—“Nice to Know You” delivers the kind of sneaky, gossipy lyricism that makes you want to send it to a friend immediately with no context.

What I love about Fancy That is how it refuses to become a capital-A Album. There’s no Big Theme, no grand artistic statement, no attempt to prove herself as a Serious Pop Star. And yet, it says more about growing up online, navigating half-relationships, and finding small, stupid comforts in music than most pop records twice its length. It’s brief, messy, addictive, and weirdly comforting in the way it gets you without having to explain itself. Like a voice note from a mate, a passing tweet, a line in a song you don’t remember where you heard.

Pink isn’t interested in timelessness—she’s soundtracking the moments you’ll forget about until a song comes on in a bar years from now, and for a minute, you’ll remember exactly how it felt.