Fancy That: PinkPantheress shows less is more

PinkPantheress, the British singer-songwriter and producer—born Victoria Beverley Walker—has always understood that brevity is a kind of power. So, it’s not surprising that the running time for her second mixtape, Fancy That, is 20 minutes and 28 seconds. She made her name on tracks that evaporated before you could quite catch them, leaving a sweet residue of yearning and drum-machine clatter.

Since To Hell with It launched her into the cultural conversation back in 2021, PinkPantheress has navigated the tricky space between cult favourite and genuine pop star. Heaven Knows (2023) widened her audience considerably, but also smoothed out some of the idiosyncratic textures that made her so compelling in the first place. Fancy That corrects course. The tape was influenced by the music of Basement Jaxx, Fatboy Slim, and Groove Armada, and that lineage announces itself immediately: this is music that wants to feel enormous yet intimate, communal yet compact, slightly reckless yet precise. It is, in a way, the most cohesive thing she has put her name to so far.

The opening track "Illegal" sets the terms of the agreement immediately. Built around a two-step skeleton that gives way to a propulsive four-on-the-floor pulse, it borrows the silky synth architecture of Underworld's "Dark & Long (Dark Train)" and wraps PinkPantheress's signature gauzy vocals around it like ribbon on a gift she insists isn't a big deal. It is, though. It's a very big deal. At two and a half minutes, it's practically novelistic for an artist whose oeuvre consists primarily of songs that barely clear 90 seconds.

The mixtape leans harder into club music than Heaven Knows did—the four-on-the-floor pulse turns up repeatedly, and the production palette favours propulsion over prettiness. But PinkPantheress is too canny an artist to simply make a dance record. The emotional centre of Fancy That is very much intact. "Tonight" is the lead single, sampling Panic! at the Disco's "Do You Know What I'm Seeing?" from their 2008 album Pretty. Odd. and transforming it into something unrecognisable in the best way as a brazen club track. "Stateside"—produced with The Dare, the Charli XCX collaborator—romanticises the distance between continents with a lightness that is betrayed by how deeply felt the subject matter—a crush heightening into obsession—is. Together, they illustrate the tape's underlying thesis: longing is a dance you never fully stop doing.

What's remarkable is how much ground the project covers without ever feeling rushed or scattered. The tempos eventually relent on "Nice to Know You" and the closer "Romeo", the latter of which arrives with something resembling orchestral warmth – strings, or at least the phantom memory of them – and functions as a gentle, wistful, elegiac exhale after everything that came before. Pulling back at the end of a dance mixtape is always a risk; here, it reads as maturity.

The brevity works in the tape's favour almost entirely, though one occasionally wishes a track would linger just a moment longer before dissolving. The songs don't outstay their welcome—if anything, they leave just as you've settled in. Whether this is a stylistic virtue or a minor frustration probably depends on how hungry you were to begin with. PinkPantheress understands that sometimes, appetite is more useful than satiation.

The cover artwork—featuring PinkPantheress in the Imperial State Crown, surrounded by red telephone booths, lipstick, flowers, and British kitsch—telegraphs the tape's thesis with a playful wink. This is a project about identity as much as sound: about what it means to be a young British artist in the mid-2020s, still reaching backwards for the music that made the culture before turning it into something unmistakably her own.

What Fancy That ultimately demonstrates is something more interesting than simple artistic evolution: It shows an artist making peace with her own instincts. PinkPantheress has always had the taste, the technical ability, and the individuality. Here, she stops second-guessing their combination. The mixtape is restless and romantic and precise in the way that only genuinely personal work tends to be—the kind of record that rewards the listener who notices the small things, because the small things are where all the feeling lives.

20 minutes. No filler. Fancy that, indeed.

Nuzhat is a compulsive doodler and connoisseur of bad early aughts television. Send her recommendations at nuzhat.tahiya@gmail.com