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PinkPantheress: Fancy That review – sharp-minded bops hop across pop’s past and present

Denigrated by some as the epitome of attention-deficit youth, the English pop musician became huge nonetheless – and her latest has an inspiringly free-associative feel

at the Disco stitched to a speedy four-to-the-floor house beat, a candy-sweet pop melody, a hefty bassline that suggests the influence of UK garage or drum’n’bass and a lyric that alludes to both Avril Lavigne’s Complicated and Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire. Perhaps inevitably, they also attracted criticism from people who viewed her less as a success story than a symptom: wilfully insubstantial, attention-deficit music befitting an era in which pop has lost its place as the basic substance of youth culture, an age when its primary function is just to burble briefly in the background of videos offering makeup tutorials and wellness tips. There are definitely points during Fancy That where you wonder if PinkPantheress’s approach isn’t occasionally a little flimsy for its own good, most obviously on Stars, which borrows from Just Jack’s 2007 pop-house hit Starz in Their Eyes – a track she previously sampled on Attracted to You – and features a childlike vocal that smacks of irksome affectation.

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