It remains to be seen if the zeitgeist-y triumph of Charli XCX’s hyperpop masterpiece Brat results in a glut of new dance records a la the discomania of the late 1970s or the EDM boom of the early 2010s. At a baseline—pun not not intended—it could open the door to more mainstream success for emerging artists like PinkPantheress, née Victoria Walker, in the United States. The English singer-songwriter-producer’s new mixtape, Fancy That, even features co-production by Charli collaborator the Dare on the single “Stateside,” a track about intercontinental courtship.
Fancy That marks a decided shift from the primarily U.K. garage of Walker’s debut studio album, Heaven Knows, toward more overt four-on-the-floor club music. The two-and-a-half-minute opening track, “Illegal,” serves as a primer for what follows, kicking off with a familiar 2-step rhythm and a sample of the sleek synth pads from Underworld’s iconic “Dark & Long (Dark Train)” before building to a 4/4 beat for a succinct but sublime 30 seconds. (In 2024, Walker told ABC News that “we don’t need a long outro.”)
“Illegal” plays more like an album intro than a proper song with a discernible pop refrain, but the tracks that follow, “Girl Like Me” and “Nice to Know You” in particular, are stacked with hooks. The former’s chorus is built around an interpolation of Basement Jaxx’s “Romeo,” amping up the English electronic duo’s maximalist approach with a flurry of skittering samples and hacked-up voices. Walker even manages to sneak in a bit of self-empowerment amid the fleeting sonic bedlam: “Way to grab from my heart, I have things to take from.”
Elsewhere, “Tonight” is an unabashed sex song—“You can ruin my makeup/Yes, it’s fine/You could even ruin my life”—that finds Walker taking a stab at bassline music (with strings lifted from Panic! at the Disco’s “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?”). By the time you reach “Stars,” the songs start to blur together, not unlike the singer’s past releases. And the brevity of the songs may leave you doubling back to make sure you didn’t miss something.
The longest track on Fancy That barely scrapes the three-minute mark, though that seems epic compared to the tracks on her 2021 mixtape To Hell with It. And yet, in just over 20 minutes, it still manages to leave a distinct impression. In a pop landscape littered with formless, easily expendable tunes readymade for TikTok, that’s enough to make you the next big thing.
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