The 20-year-old Englishwoman, who calls herself PinkPantheress and whose hits spread on the social network TikTok last year, won the annual BBC Sound of 2022 poll.
PinkPantheress, who does not publish her name, was born in the English city of Bath to a Kenyan mother and an English father. She grew up in Kent, played the piano from the age of twelve, and preferred to listen to Michael Jackson. As a teenager, she sang with a school emo rock band and played music in the GarageBand program at night in college.
“When I was about 15, I watched a recording of Paramore’s performance at the Reading Festival,” recalls for the BBC, which made her devote more time to music. “You’ve seen singer Hayley Williams enjoy it. When I realized she was getting paid for it, I decided I wanted to learn,” said PinkPantheress, a South Korean K-pop listener.
She started uploading her first attempts on the Soundcloud server, where they did not meet with much response, and later on the social network for young people, TikTok. There, her tracks, lasting from 12 seconds to two minutes, resonated until PinkPantheress reached the charts with them in August.
“I don’t like singing the same melody all the time. Once I finish one, I’ll think it could have been better, and I’m starting to think of another,” explains the artist, who is watched by over 1.1 million people on TikTok today. The popularity may have been due to the fact that last year the world started another wave of the pandemic and people were more attached to social networks due to lockdowns than before.
Coverversion of one of her songs played and the well-known Coldplay, she is currently co-nominated for a Brit Award with rapper Central Ce, who sampled her track Obsessed with You.
Recently, PinkPantheress performed the first three concerts in the intimate London area of The Pickle Factory with a capacity of about 200 people.
Her music is characterized by a close-up voice and retro samples of dance, jungle, R&B or drum’n’bass music from the beginning of the millennium, in which she sings about obsession or disappointment, writes the BBC.
