PinkPantheress revamps the 2000s in sour candy mixtape Fancy That

Still bound to trend on TikTok with her highly energized and ever short songs, the Bath-raised Londoner has confirmed her status as a musician in her own right in just four years, two EPs, an album and one mixtape. Now, she puts her own spin to songs with the likes of Danny L Harle, FKA Twigs and KAYTRANADA, appears on the Barbie soundtrack, and has successfully enamored every part of the globe with a unique formula of musical and cinematographic influences, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and the capacity to remain authentic in the face of it all.

Fancy That, her latest addition, feels like a hooking, frantic 20-minute race from Illegal to Romeo, never once slowing down to let you catch your breath. Introducing herself in the first line (“My name is Pink and I’m really glad to meet you”), Walker holds our hand through a rollercoaster leading us back to the mid-2000s. She samples Panic!AtTheDisco’s Do You Know What I’m Seeing? in Tonight, a nice wink to her high school emo/pop-punk band, where she covered My Chemical Romance and Green Day among others.

This is just one of a plethora of nods to her musical idols: we can decipher the Starz In Their Eyes chorus (by Just Jack) meshed with Basement Jaxx’s Oh My Gosh in Stars, the last appearing in Girl Like Me and Romeo, as well; and we recognize Nardo Wick’s “What the fuck is that?” from his 2021 track Who Want Smoke? – scraps of the genre she listened to most while making this project ; rap. Though composed of too many samples to count, PinkPantheress avoids an easy trap: that of jumbling together a bunch of references in the hopes of landing in the soundtrack of the next social media trend, although she inevitably will.. Instead, not unlike an old-school DJ bringing their deep cuts on stage, the 24-year-old deftly merges sometimes obscure songs within her own universe. Willingly, we follow her into the rabbit hole – only to come out of it disheveled and with a full grin.

What really sets this mixtape apart from her other releases, though, is that she is embracing those influences here, putting them on blast to better fuel the album, as opposed to her debut album, where, as many as there were, they remained in the shadows. While Heaven Knows explore the moodier, more serious aspects of a debut album over a 90s soft gothic aesthetic and RnB melodies, Fancy That presents itself as its polar opposite: flirty, bubbly and a reimagination of the 2000s through the modern, nostalgic lens of the 2020s.

In a pop blend of drum’n’bass, jungle and UK garage among other intrinsically British genres, PinkPantheress’ mixtape feels like its own fantasy world, a series of unfortunate events that she manages to relate in the most entertaining way. From dealing with a bothersome drug dealer while lending an ear to her friend’s relationship woes in Stars, to propositioning her crush in Tonight and the paranoia of being home alone in Noises (“But my parents said they would be returning soon”), or even the crushing realization that you might slowly be losing a close friend (“You’re unemotional / It was nice to know you”) in Nice To Know You, the musician manages to make mundane experiences sound exhilarating. Self-aware of her immaturity and human weaknesses, she never takes a second to slow down, refusing to let misfortunes stop her from seeing the positive side of life.

Lively, humoristic, at times melancholic, the multi-hyphenate gifts us vignettes of her vivid imagination in a frenzy. Instead of it resulting in a cacophony of voices – as it easily would, had anyone else attempted it – PinkPantheress succeeds in gluing the many parts of her personality into one body of work, precisely because she faces all its facets, even the uglier, more vulnerable sides of herself. In Fancy That, the singer’s idiosyncratic short form fits her like a glove, and what could result in an indigestible piece instead works as the soundtrack to the introverted girl scrapbooking in a bedroom of poster-covered, plaid-patterned walls. In short, this summer release remains, months later, an addictive, bite-sized snack bound to be played on repeat – and to no end.