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9 hours ago
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From the look of the crowd at PinkPantheress’s show in Brooklyn last night, you’d be forgiven for thinking that King Charles had extended his recent trip to New York. The crowd that snaked its way through a never-ending circuit of cracked asphalt and grimy water on their way to Brooklyn Storehouse wore union jacks and tartan miniskirts, which you could imagine would be in line with royal protocol for how to dress when a sovereign visits a warehouse rave.
PinkPantheress is certainly royalty among a vast swath of young, terminally online people; a pop princess who is mainstream enough to clinch top billing at Coachella and perform on primetime TV, but whose taste has always leaned more niche and left-field than anything that would ever go platinum. Or would it? Pop music is always in a state of flux but we’re living through an interesting period of realignment. Chalk it up to AI backlash, a floundering music industry or fatigue with chart-gaming reindeer games, but lately a raft of musicians who’d played nice for years have seen big rewards going for broke with wildly adventurous work. Performers like Slayyyter, Zara Larsson and Jade, who’d once been siloed off as “pop’s middle class” or incarcerated in the “Khia asylum” have been rewarded twice over for their boldness with both critical acclaim and charting hits. PinkPantheress is something of a figurehead among these artists and one of its brightest hopes. Her show yesterday night at Brooklyn Storehouse doubled as a flex of her star power and a mini-music festival highlighting a wave of like-minded musicians who are just as poised to break out.
Before Pink took to the stage at Brooklyn Storehouse, Underscores lit the place on fire with her stammering, maximalist riff on hyperpop. Ditto The Dare, the first of two twink performers to take to the stage in skinny suits. His set was bass-heavy and slinky, finding a scummy, lascivious edge to songs like Addison Rae’s Fame Is a Gun and leveraging it to its full crowd-pleasing potential. But what really set people over the edge was his final song, a preview of his collaboration with Charli xcx, Rock Music, which immediately prompted everyone in sight to raise their phones and record.
Looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment I first began to think PinkPantheress might be an actual genius. “What is something the fans don’t know about you?” a disembodied street interviewer asked the singer. “OK, I’m bald underneath, I have a shaved head,” she deadpans to the camera, gesturing at her fringe: “This is a wig, I’m bald literally.” If the received idea of pop stardom is that it rests on a performer’s well-kept vanity, it’s much rarer for an artist to undercut it altogether. PinkPantheress is one of the greatest self-inventors in contemporary pop music, an artist who has squared her eccentricity with style and played a brilliant hand in becoming her own cartoon. Chatty, bonkers and a never-ending source of meme fodder, she’s as compelling a pop star as she is a comic figure; someone you could equally hold up to divas like Kelela, FKA twigs and Tinashe, as well as gen Z’s answer to RuPaul, Pee-wee Herman or Mr Bean.
This bore itself out from the very beginning with some amazingly funny visuals: PinkPantheress playing the part of a winking everywoman, sitting in a window seat and riding in a taxi cab, blasting Kylie Minogue and MIA through her headphones, before breaking the fourth wall to prove her own mettle as a pop star. Show opener, Stateside is an undeniable track littered with a million small hooks which the audience responded to at every single turn. This was the case throughout the show; even for songs she’d managed to supercharge (like the already epic Capable of Love) or that she was convinced were obscure in the first place (like the harp-driven banger Ophelia). It was fascinating to see how the former bedroom pop producer had scaled up across the board, how understated tracks like Pain or Just for Me could coexist with show-stopping numbers like Girl Like Me or Romeo. She’s come amazingly far in a remarkably short period of time, and it’s thrilling to think how much farther she will go.
Apart from making a wildly likable buddy act, PinkPantheress’s partnership with DJ Joe also has tremendous musical value. He isn’t simply a hype man but a control operator, someone who can smoothly manage incoming and outgoing noise. Taken together, her seemingly infinite capacity for production and his command for how to sequence unwieldy, ricocheting music makes them a formidable team. PinkPantheress’s backing band was also remarkable, especially drummer Blake Cascoe, who was able to handle jungle beats and speed-garage time signatures so aggressively fast that there were moments I was worried his arm might snap off altogether.
PinkPantheress has levelled up so radically that it’s a particular shame that her show was hampered by an inadequate venue where it was often difficult to see the singer or fully hear her. An over-eager sound guy kept playing backing tracks in punishing succession, forcing her to carry on with the show, when she said she wanted to pause and speak for a moment. It was a mixed blessing that she was only given the opportunity to do that when people had overheated or passed out. Even with the sheer number of highlights, including a surprise appearance by Kelela, who debuted a glimpse of their forthcoming collab The Bridge, the place really marred its sense of occasion. Royalty like PinkPantheress shouldn’t have to stoop like that.
