PinkPantheress doesn’t think anyone would be too surprised by the collection of songs saved to her phone. Her own records are often erratic, moving quickly from one idea to the next. It makes sense, then, that when she let Rolling Stone sift through her library on the latest installment of Song Shuffle, the results yielded songs from Davido, Kaytranada, Normani, and more.
“My playlist is actually a little bit of fuckery,” PinkPantheress says. The first song up is Rihanna and Drake’s “Work.” The record takes the musician back to the much-reminisced-about summer of 2016, when every party playlist was dominated by Anti and Views. Between “Work” and “One Dance,” she says, “you could not escape. You couldn’t leave the house.”
The same can be said of Davido’s “Fall,” which PinkPantheress says is a staple of African weddings, in particular. “I’m African and I’m from the UK, so there’s like a five-song rotation of songs that basically all Africans know in the UK, and this, I think, is one of them,” she says. “That’s a function one, or a wedding, specifically an African wedding, the reception.” Big functions like a wedding are great for popular, familiar songs, but some guilty pleasures stay in the vault. PinkPantheress names Justin Bieber’s My World 2.0 as one of hers.
But she’s also vocal about her love for Kaytranda, whose Thundercat collaboration “Be Careful” pops up during her shuffle. “I’m the biggest Kaytranada fan. When I was first making music and producing, I’d listen to him a lot and just try and imitate that style,” PinkPantheress says. “I think what makes him so good is because his skills are very much limited to basically him and him only, which is why you can’t find many people that replicate his sound very well. He’s so incredible to me.”
After covering the bases of Afrobeats, bubblegum pop, electronic house, and UK rap (she loves Central Cee and Potter Payper), PinkPantheress’ library expands to “Wild Side,” Normani and Cardi B’s “genius dark R&B song” that interpolates drums from Aaliyah’s “One in a Million.” “I’m such a nerd for this shit,” she says. “My producer brain went off, and I was like, okay, this is the stroke of genius.”
Her producer brain took center stage on her recently released mixtape, Fancy That, which features the viral single “Illegal.” “Whenever I make music, I always imagine the listener to look like me,” she says. “So when I say that, I mean, girlies my age, East African girls, I’m imagining it’s for them. Fifth percent of my fans, I’d say, are K-Pop fans who are also East African. Pretty much any venue that will have me, I’m just honored to be played by anyone, to be honest.”
