PinkPantheress: ‘Music’s been the same for so long. Can we get something else?’

After uploading her tracks online, the UK singer-producer thought the industry was a closed shop. Then she turned to TikTok ...

In December, a TikTok user in London named PinkPantheress started uploading clips of a song, intending to keep at it until someone notices". Ten months later, the social media platform named her song Just for Me its breakout track of the summer; it has more than 20m plays on Spotify and, after being sampled by the drill rapper Central Cee, went into the UK Top Five.

A flood of similarly fleeting tracks have followed: rarely lasting more than two minutes, they are mostly self-produced, lo-fi mash-ups of saccharine-sweet vocals and jungle and drum'n'bass beats. Gen Z adores her; Grimes and Charli XCX are fans; Lizzo and Charli d'Amelio, TikTok's reigning queen, have used her music to soundtrack their own TikToks.