The resurgence of turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics in mainstream music — as seen in the 2000s rap fixations of Doja Cat’s Scarlet, the late-’90s R&B samples infiltrating New York drill, and the delightfully crunchy Spiritbox remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Cobra” — sees the present judging the past’s predictions for itself. It’s a riot revisiting old notions of how the world might play out when the same sense of impending cataclysm at the end of the previous century is setting in again. The resonances were inevitable.
This is what’s happening inside the two- and three-minute dance-pop confections of 22-year-old British songwriter and producer PinkPantheress, who emerged from the lo-fi music ether with compact love songs calling back to another era. Her 2021 mixtape to hell with it catalogued an increasingly refined flair for pairing bubbly melodies and jittery drums indebted to ’90s and aughts U.K. dance music. “Last Valentines” showcased her delicate touch as a vocalist and producer, squeezing cool, breezy pop out of a loud, lumbering Hybrid Theory cut. Neglecting to share her real name, Pantheress seemed eager to let the songs speak for themselves, existing as a kind of sentient low-poly breaks compilation. But her career ambitions have necessitated a more corporeal relationship to her audience than maybe she ever intended. For her debut album Heaven Knows, she’s doing promotion via light-hearted music videos and pop-up stores appearances while working on beefier song structures, growing into her confidence and musicality without crowding the work.
Heaven Knows manages to feel both light and quietly considered. It’s a melange of Y2K-era dance music fan service and modern pop production values serving drum and bass and garage without the sharp edges, along with nods to emo, hip-hop, and K-pop. At 34 minutes, it’s nearly twice as long as to hell with it. Working alongside Adele collaborator Greg Kurstin, rapper/beatmaker phil, producer and remixer Mura Masa, and hyperpop luminary Count Baldor keeps Pantheress plugged into trends outside the central thread of setting rubbery Europop diva vocals to beats that dial down the abrasiveness favored by the breakbeat-melting ’90s and aughts classics they seem to reference. The mid-album sequence of “Nice to Meet You,” “Bury Me,” and “Internet Baby (Interlude)” suggests endless possibilities to explore. “Nice” brings U.K. drill rapper Central Cee along for a tabla-laced ghettotech/electro tune, whose hi hats can’t decide which side of the Atlantic to post up on; Kelela drops in on “Bury Me,” a dewy R&B duet punctuated by jittery drill hits, before “Internet Baby” adds trap drums and fuzz-drenched guitar to the mix.
Everywhere, treble levels run low, smoothing the noise. The distorted guitar line ricocheting through the mix in “Internet Baby” is neat and quiet; the drill hi hats in “Bury Me” dance, carrying none of the typical urgency and menace. The time-displaced “True Romance” typifies the self-aware bedroom pop expansionism Heaven Knows is attempting. “I’ve been in love with you since 2004,” Pantheress sings in a cascading melody, embodying a concertgoer swooning at the sight of her favorite musician. It reframes the beat — which modulates between a rock groove and muted drum and bass, like OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and “B.O.B.” on a loop — as a history project tracking the international reverberations of Black music in the years when chart-topping American artists mixed pop, rock, and rap, and their British counterparts fathered half a dozen vital electronic subgenres and cultures.
It’s odd for this confident synthesis of musical developments from a quarter century ago to come from someone born after the release of the Craig David and Tina Moore records that popularized the pairing of soulful vocals and jittery drums heard in “Another Life,” “Blue,” and “Capable of Love.” PinkPantheress has studied her shit, and Heaven Knows seems like a labor of love with a better budget than the last one. Another artist cynically reviving old hits to coast on trends would probably pick a bigger money tree to shake. The songs Heaven Knows pulls from directly — a deep cut off the EP release of a K-pop classic, the Spandau Ballet smash after “True,” Nigerian Afrobeats star Oxlade’s summer 2022 hit “Ku Lo Sa” — offer small melodic ideas for Pantheress and her collaborators’ productions to snowball drums and hooks around. (“Ku Lo Sa” appears in “Feel Complete” as a cloud of reverb, like it’s bleeding through a wall, the way the Streets’ 2002 garage gem “Weak Become Heroes” simulates standing between two competing DJ sets.) Heaven Knows isn’t just reheating time-tested melodies. It sounds like lightning struck a 160 GB iPod, came to life, and we’re now listening to the theme music for the anime about it.
The longer songs at the end of the album point to the places Pantheress can go if she continues to push herself as a writer and producer. The pre-choruses and bridges between the verses and choruses in “Capable of Love” and “Ophelia” show how much harder a refrain can hit when a song is carefully building toward it instead of getting straight to the point. The pain in “Ophelia” — “So tell me, what did I do to deserve you killing me this way?” — demands patience and receives it. Just as often, the extra 30-60 seconds in a song’s runtime is coming from a gorgeous bit of beat riding out after the preceding love song is done. The guitar riff in “Capable” gets space to roam around. “Feel Complete” — a hip-hop soul jam about trying not to drink through a breakup — lets you sit with the heavy feelings it trudges up as melodies fade into bird calls like morning arriving after a terrible night.
The softness, sweetness, and subversively nerdy musical restlessness holding these songs together sets them apart from contemporary releases anchored by noisily obvious reinterpretations of decades-old hits. “Boy’s a Liar” — one of the most popular songs in the country thanks to a remix with Ice Spice — doesn’t land like a plot to capitalize on renewed fascination with the sensibilities of the George Bush and Tony Blair years. It scans as an artist who truly loves Jersey club, jungle, drum and bass, house, and their cousins stepping into her ambitions concurrently to waxing public interest in electronic music. The nostalgia elicited by her astute recreations of these sounds puts PinkPantheress in conversations about obsession with the cultural real estate between 1998 and 2002, but Heaven Knows suggests a much more curious ear.
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