The Song Of The Year Award – A Very British Superstar

After acclimatising to instant fame, PinkPantheress, the singer-songwriter-producer behind 'Boy's a Liar Pt. 2", is confidently laying down her boundaries and refusing to conform to expectations - as she releases her most adventurous work yet

- By Natty Kasambala. Photography by Jeff Hahn

PinkPantheress lets out a quiet groan as we approach the pier. We seem to have noticed in unison that we are the only Black people around, maybe for miles; we’re also the youngest people in the queue we join, by at least 35 years. It’s 4pm on a Wednesday, and we’re in Kew Gardens in southwest London, preparing to board a riverboat cruise down the Thames. “I love doing an activity,” she says, in a tone so deadpan it almost sounds sarcastic. “I actually wanted to go see Magic Mike [Live] today, but I didn’t end up getting tickets.”

The perpetually viral singer-songwriter-producer is just in from LA, where she lives part of the time, and is already kind of wishing she was back there. “London’s not that exciting to me anymore,” she says with an apologetic grimace.

Raised in the suburbs of Kent, PinkPantheress, 22, was drawn to London from an early age, and moved there as soon as she could, for university. When she was propelled to notoriety a few years back, she was still studying film — one of many young people robbed of the full student experience by the pandemic. But it was that forced confinement that gave her extra time to experiment with music. She recorded at home, mostly on GarageBand, challenging herself to consistently put snippets of songs out into the world. (PinkPantheress was her TikTok username.) “Day 2 of posting my song until someone notices it,” she wrote in the text accompanying an early TikTok. And then, at first gradually and then seemingly all at once, without uttering her birth name or initially showing her entire face, suddenly, millions of people did notice.