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PinkPantheress Mixes Innovation With Pristine Pop Savvy on the Pulsating ‘Fancy That’: Album Review
'Boy's a Liar' singer PinkPantheress' new eight-song mixtape 'Fancy That' blazes by in less than 20 minutes and packs a velvet-gloved punch.
British dance-pop savant PinkPantheress ’ initial appeal was due in no small part to her TikTok-shaped ability with what we’ll call microsongs: concise, relatively conventional pop songs with verses, choruses and often a bridge that last for 90 seconds or less. Well, that trend hasn’t taken the world by storm, for her or anyone else, yet the good news with PP’s latest mixtape is that she has balanced that approach with more-traditional pop structures much more successfully than on her last album, 2023’s “Heaven Knows.” Although that album was good and spotlighted her inimitable, breathy British-accented vocals — and spawned her biggest hit to date, the Ice Spice duet “Boy’s a Liar” — the songs themselves were sometimes too normal: Super-producer Greg Kurstin and other mainstream hitmakers occasionally neutered what makes this particular pantheress special. She and her collaborators (primarily 23-year-old Norwegian coproducer/cowriter Aksel Arvid, who’s also worked with Amine and Jack Harlow) have peppered the songs with brief, cleverly utilized samples and interpolations, doubling down on the Y2K by including three from Basement Jaxx — whose 2001 album “Rooty” is one of the best of that era — and one each from Underworld and William Orbit, along with Gamble & Huff and even Panic!
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