Variety Music Innovator of the Year PinkPantheress on Her Songs and Performing at Glastonbury: ‘I Didn’t Know If I Was Gonna Be Able to Get Over My Fear’
The timing of Variety Music’s Innovator of the Year award (presented by Sandisk) could not have been more fitting for 24-year-old Victoria Beverly Walker — aka the British alt-pop singer-songwriter-producer PinkPantheress, perhaps best-known for her 2023 smash “Boy’s a Liar.” She is now, somewhat officially, Dr. Pantheress.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate from England’s University of Kent just two days before this interview took place in late July, even though she’d left college after a year to pursue music.
“They just offered me a doctorate, so obviously I’m going to have to say yes!” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. “That’s pretty much it, to be honest. My dad used to teach there and I’m from Canterbury,” where the university is based. However, she noted during her acceptance speech that she’d joined her first band in the city and uploaded her first songs to SoundCloud there — which was its own form of career-related higher education, and where her path to both honors began.
PinkPantheress’ early SoundCloud and TikTok tracks showed her to be a both boundary-pushing and singular artist, with effervescent melodies sung in her unmistakable, breathy, British-accented voice over samples from the ’90s and ’00s and driving drum and bass-influenced rhythms. Most strikingly, the songs were short — often just 90 seconds or so — but they were fully formed, with verses, choruses and a bridge, a rarity in the snippet-obsessed TikTok age. It’s a format to which she’s partially returned on her latest release, the stellar “Fancy That,” an eight-song collection that blazes by in just over 20 minutes but still feels like a complete statement.
“They were short,” she says of her early tracks, “but not with an absolute, like, intentionality — it was just the natural progression of the songs. I don’t think music needs to follow any rules, which is how I think everybody should feel. I just thought one-minute-30 wasn’t a big deal as long as the song was good, and I still hold that same opinion.”
She began posting songs in 2019 and within less than two years had signed with Warner Music’s Parlophone imprint, releasing some of the tracks on her debut mixtape, “To Hell With It.” But her career really took off when rapper Ice Spice jumped on a remix of the 2022 track “Boy’s a Liar” and they ended up with a global hit that reached No. 2 in her native U.K. and No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. She followed with a proper debut album, “Heaven Knows,” which found her taking on more conventional songwriting formats and sounds, but she returned to her scrappier, more experimental (and shorter) style on “Fancy That,” which is officially categorized as a mixtape even though it could just as easily be an album. What’s the distinction?
“I think those differences are subconscious more than anything,” she says. “If I go in thinking it’s a mixtape, then I operate a little differently: An album is a way more official body of work, a stake in the sand to really solidify and showcase all of your talents and say ‘This is an era,’ and a mixtape is more like ‘This is how I’m feeling now.’”
She’ll spend the fall supporting “Fancy That” on tour, which she says has been the most challenging aspect of her career so far. Like many artists whose stars rose during the pandemic, her popularity was far ahead of her experience as a performer when the world opened up.
“That’s why I always say in interviews that people are watching me become a performer in real time,” she says. “I set high standards for myself and I just don’t do things that I’m not good at, so I’ve had to basically go against my nature and just jump into things that I know I need to work on. For me it’s more of a confidence thing — like when [her first performance at England’s massive Glastonbury festival] was coming up, my fear was, ‘Well, I can’t do this to a high enough standard, so should I just not do it?’
“But it’s gotten better as time has gone on,” she continues, “and I was shocked watching the video back from Glastonbury and realizing how confident I looked, and how nice I looked. I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to get over my fear, and I’m pleased that I did,” she concludes, before adding with another self-deprecating laugh, “Not to sound cheesy.”
She was awarded an honorary doctorate from England’s University of Kent just two days before this interview took place in late July, even though she’d left college after a year to pursue music.
“They just offered me a doctorate, so obviously I’m going to have to say yes!” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. “That’s pretty much it, to be honest. My dad used to teach there and I’m from Canterbury,” where the university is based. However, she noted during her acceptance speech that she’d joined her first band in the city and uploaded her first songs to SoundCloud there — which was its own form of career-related higher education, and where her path to both honors began.
PinkPantheress’ early SoundCloud and TikTok tracks showed her to be a both boundary-pushing and singular artist, with effervescent melodies sung in her unmistakable, breathy, British-accented voice over samples from the ’90s and ’00s and driving drum and bass-influenced rhythms. Most strikingly, the songs were short — often just 90 seconds or so — but they were fully formed, with verses, choruses and a bridge, a rarity in the snippet-obsessed TikTok age. It’s a format to which she’s partially returned on her latest release, the stellar “Fancy That,” an eight-song collection that blazes by in just over 20 minutes but still feels like a complete statement.
“They were short,” she says of her early tracks, “but not with an absolute, like, intentionality — it was just the natural progression of the songs. I don’t think music needs to follow any rules, which is how I think everybody should feel. I just thought one-minute-30 wasn’t a big deal as long as the song was good, and I still hold that same opinion.”
She began posting songs in 2019 and within less than two years had signed with Warner Music’s Parlophone imprint, releasing some of the tracks on her debut mixtape, “To Hell With It.” But her career really took off when rapper Ice Spice jumped on a remix of the 2022 track “Boy’s a Liar” and they ended up with a global hit that reached No. 2 in her native U.K. and No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. She followed with a proper debut album, “Heaven Knows,” which found her taking on more conventional songwriting formats and sounds, but she returned to her scrappier, more experimental (and shorter) style on “Fancy That,” which is officially categorized as a mixtape even though it could just as easily be an album. What’s the distinction?
“I think those differences are subconscious more than anything,” she says. “If I go in thinking it’s a mixtape, then I operate a little differently: An album is a way more official body of work, a stake in the sand to really solidify and showcase all of your talents and say ‘This is an era,’ and a mixtape is more like ‘This is how I’m feeling now.’”
She’ll spend the fall supporting “Fancy That” on tour, which she says has been the most challenging aspect of her career so far. Like many artists whose stars rose during the pandemic, her popularity was far ahead of her experience as a performer when the world opened up.
“That’s why I always say in interviews that people are watching me become a performer in real time,” she says. “I set high standards for myself and I just don’t do things that I’m not good at, so I’ve had to basically go against my nature and just jump into things that I know I need to work on. For me it’s more of a confidence thing — like when [her first performance at England’s massive Glastonbury festival] was coming up, my fear was, ‘Well, I can’t do this to a high enough standard, so should I just not do it?’
“But it’s gotten better as time has gone on,” she continues, “and I was shocked watching the video back from Glastonbury and realizing how confident I looked, and how nice I looked. I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to get over my fear, and I’m pleased that I did,” she concludes, before adding with another self-deprecating laugh, “Not to sound cheesy.”