PinkPantheress gives me hope for Gen Z
If you are over the age of 25 and would like to feel old, I recommend going to a PinkPantheress gig. Last night at Alexandra Palace in north London I felt out of touch even in what I hoped were youth-approved baggy jeans: it was a festival of pedal pushers, rara skirts and the kind of coloured tights that I thought had been outlawed somewhere between the financial crash and Little Mix winning The X Factor. True to Gen Z form, when Pink – whose real name is Victoria Walker – arrived onstage for the final UK gig of her tour “An Evening with PinkPantheress”, 10,000 phones were held aloft to capture the moment.
The funny thing is, of course, that only if you are over the age of 25 would you have any frame of reference for the aesthetic of this former TikTok musician and now bona fide pop star (who is herself 25 – a fact that, I regret to inform you, means she was born in 2001). PinkPantheress is obsessed with the 2000s, from her GHD-straight hair to her peplum tops to her lurid, cutesy videos – and, most importantly, her music, which samples heavily from classic garage and drum and bass and sounds, fittingly, like someone has put the year 2002 through a Snapchat filter.
It is all, also, absolutely fantastic – a loving tribute to a golden period of dance music, an insouciant and yet reverential wink at fashion that’s so ugly it’s cool, and, most importantly, a prodigiously talented songwriter and producer working at the very top of her game: precise, innovative, charismatic and self-effacing, making the retro sound fresh and the future sound vintage.
She opened with “Stateside”, a song that winks at Estelle’s 2008 hit “American Boy” and which has recently blown up thanks to a remix featuring Swedish pop star Zara Larsson. It’s a track that hams up her Britishness – “never met a British girl before”, she coos, complete with glottal stop – a core feature of the aesthetic. With four dancers, a DJ and a live drummer, she performed an airport choreography sequence in her ballet pumps and capri pants, effortless as the crowd screamed with joy.
From there, more hits from her 2025 album Fancy That drew the biggest reaction; Rachel Chinouriri joined her for “Romeo”, and then, later, Jade (incidentally a former member of Little Mix) made an appearance for the impossibly catchy “Tonight”. In the middle section of the show she played older, slightly more subdued tracks from her first two albums, To Hell With It (2021) and Heaven Knows (2023); those who had queued for hours knew every word from these songs, made when Pink was just a teenager posting on TikTok. For the final section, she returned with “Girl Like Me”, a perfect, spluttering pop-dance track built around the groove from Basement Jaxx’s 2001 hit “Romeo”, and smiled and shimmied through a euphoric rendition of her 2023 breakout hit “Boy’s a Liar”.
What is fascinating is that while it may look like Y2K nostalgia – and certainly feels like it when Pink drops another breakneck drum and bass beat in the middle of a song – it is for a time and place that never existed. Yes, these clothes and sounds represent a time just before it all changed, before Facebook, before 3G, before the recession, before, in the eyes of millennials and their elders, everything went wrong – but this crowd, and this artist, did not experience that time. All they have is a fantasy of how it felt – and that fantasy seems to be a tartan-clad, flip-phone answering, sexy, kind, inclusive Britain, ravey yet wholesome, cute and cool. As much as we would like it to be, it was never quite real.
But, counterintuitively, that’s exactly what made the show so uplifting. The fact is that PinkPantheress doesn’t really represent nostalgia for the past. She represents optimism for the future. Just a few years ago Pink seemed like an avant-garde oddity. You might even have used her music to prove that we are all doomed, with her hyper-processed soundscape and two-minute tracks, designed to serve those with depleted attention spans. But how wrong she has proved everyone. It’s been a while since I felt so invigorated by a show, so impressed by the innovating spirit in a room, and so sure that digital culture doesn’t have to spell apocalypse. These teenagers and twenty-somethings were utterly captivated, fully in the moment – a moment that could not have existed without screens and reels.
She closed the night with her megahit “Illegal”, its opening synth hits vibrating around Ally Pally. Phones in the air again – and why not? This is the only gig I’ve seen in years that, ironically, wasn’t at all dewy-eyed about the past. “Let it all go,” the crowd screamed with her in “Girl Like Me” – a refrain from a song that was released the year she was born. Listen up, and let PinkPantheress propel you into the new world. You might realise it’s not nearly as bad as it seems.
