PinkPantheress reaches for the sky on “Heaven Knows”
Graphic by Julia Norkus
By Bennett Himmel
For the last two years, PinkPantheress has proven herself to be one of the most influential voices in indie pop. Breakbeats have always been a pretty essential part of pop music, but in 2021, nobody had mixed Clairo-esque bedroom pop with atmospheric drum and bass. Her music instantly captured the attention of Gen Z due to the way it perfectly fed into the TikTok algorithm: none of the songs went over three minutes, and her lyricism was moody yet vague, evoking endless emotions— but incredibly hard to label ones. By the time she released her debut mixtape, to hell with it, there were endless PinkPantheress clones, putting breathy autotuned vocals over Amen Breaks and gaining thousands of streams. None of them were anywhere near as good as PinkPantheress. Now, on her long-awaited debut album Heaven Knows, PinkPantheress has expanded upon her bedroom pop sound, creating a slick, hyperreal, dark-pop record that proves that she’s no fad.
I have incredibly fond memories of riding around my hometown in 2021 blasting “Pain” and the tragically now-deleted “Just a Waste,” but I never expected PinkPantheress to catapult into pop stardom. Despite the instant dopamine hit her music provided, it always read as a little too experimental, too surreal, too lo-fi to capture (and hold) the attention of the general public. Her 2023 EP Take Me Home was enjoyable, but didn’t do much with her already well-established sound and barely moved the cultural needle. Then, something weird happened. That thing? Ice Spice. When Ice Spice hopped on a remix of the EP’s best track, “Boy’s a Liar,” lightning in a bottle was captured. Ice Spice provided instantly iconic lines like “He say that I’m good enough / Grabbin’ my duh-duh-duh” that worked perfectly over the song’s cutesy chiptune production, and she provided a lyrical foil to PinkPantheress’ insecurity. The remix was a quick success, becoming one of the biggest songs of 2023. The song appears as a bonus track on Heaven Knows, and while I’m always down to listen to it, it feels out of place on the record. It’s way brighter and sillier than the rest of the songs, and it is clearly just tacked onto the record to boost streams.
The rest of Heaven Knows, then, is a revelation. The record is dark, stormy and sultry, yet endlessly catchy and danceable. The opener, “Another Life,” sounds borderline medieval, with church organs and a pounding drum and bass beat. Her lyricism has clearly improved, adding specificity without sacrificing relatability. The song’s subject matter is remarkably darker than her previous work, as she sings about her lover dying in the night, then swiftly moving on. She condenses a traumatic experience into one classically dramatic phrase: “I guess I’ll see you in another life.” The entire record is quite melodramatic and macabre; the refrain of the single “Mosquito” is “I just had a dream I was dead / And I only cared cause I was taken from you.” However, it’s juxtaposed against production reminiscent of bossa nova, and the effect is heavenly and sweet. If I were to compare PinkPantheress to any early ‘00s artist, I would say Lily Allen: her subject matter is often dark, but her vocals sound like she can’t be bothered with the most severe of situations.
Despite the twisted lyrical content, Heaven Knows is all bangers. Every song is danceable and hooky — this is a pop album after all — but it’s the atmosphere that makes the listener feel that something is slightly amiss. “Nice To Meet You” has one of PinkPantheress’ catchiest hooks yet, but the vocal processing and overall vibe feel uncanny and pulled from another era. The song would be perfect if not for an incredibly lackluster Central Cee feature (“I might risk it for a biscuit?” Seriously?)
PinkPantheress’ work has always been very rooted in nostalgia— her imagery and sound feel very Y2K, but not in a traditional sense. She’s not a Paris and Nicole historian; she’s far from “bimbo-core.” Heaven Knows comes closest to nostalgia on the record’s penultimate track, “Feelings.” The song is immediately reminiscent of Britney Spears’s classic album “Blackout.” The synths are dark and industrial, the production is sparse and PinkPantheress’ vocal processing makes her sound nervous, post-human and absolutely ravenous for validation (“No one ever told me to worrrryyyyyyyyy! / I realize that I’m peaking too earrrrrrrlyyyyy!”)
The PinkPantheress vision comes into full force on the album’s closer (and best track) “Capable of Love.” While PinkPantheress has never made a bad song, it can sometimes feel like she’s made the same song a million times. Atmospheric drum and bass beat; autotuned, airy vocals; shy lyricism. “Capable of Love” has all of those things, but it reaches an emotional high that she’s never hit before. The song is nearly four minutes — insanely long by PinkPantheress standards — and this allows PinkPantheress’ lyricism to sprawl out. It features her best lyric yet, “I’m obsessed with the idea that one day it breaks up / ‘Cause after that, I know I’ll never be as capable of love.” It’s heart-wrenching and feels like the most raw she’s been thus far. The song crescendos with fuzzy guitars, something we’ve never heard on a PinkPantheress track yet, and I really, really hope she continues in that direction on the next album. It’s a brilliant pop song about how love and disappointment can so frequently be intertwined.
Heaven Knows is easily one of my favorite pop albums of the year. It feels like it’s from a bygone time in which people actually made cohesive albums. It’s completely free of stream-bait (besides “Boy’s a Liar pt. 2” being tacked on… What can you do?), but it’s still so firmly grounded in the modern era. It pulls so evenly from the past, present and future and immediately feels like a pop classic, a record that will be talked about for years to come. There are endless drum and bass-influenced pop artists out right now, but ‘heaven knows’ that none of them could make an album like this. Heaven Knows feels singular; it’s witty, sad, restrained, bold, fun and intimate all at once. In the interlude “Internet Baby,” PinkPantheress repeats that she is “not your Internet baby” over and over again. When you listen to this album, you believe her.