On October 12th, viral musician PinkPantheress finally announced her debut album, Heaven Knows. The highly-anticipated project came out two years after the artist’s breakout EP, To Hell With It, which was released in October of 2021. Beginning as just a teenage girl releasing snippets of her music on social media, her organic rise and blossoming career is something to be studied. Leading up to the album’s release, the artist released the tracks Mosquito and Capable of love. With those two tracks, it is very apparent that PinkPantheress is consistently constructing and defining her sound. The 13-track debut album, titled Heaven Knows, is PinkPantheress’ follow-up to her EP, To Hell With It.
The album opens with Another Life, featuring Nigerian artist Rema. The song opens with church organs and closes with church organs paired with a guitar solo. In the song, PinkPantheress interpolates lyrics from f(x)’s song 아이스크림 (Ice Cream): “You melt up my body and all my heart.” She has always been very vocal for her love for K-Pop and its influence on her music and in November of this year, she listed f(x) as one of her favorite girl groups. PinkPantheress’ DNB and breakbeat sound is something that she’s famously known for and with this album, she not only continues with it but expands it.
Like her EP, To Hell With It, this album explores her love-related moody sentiments and those songs are like listening to the entries of her diary. And a new theme that is explored with this album is death. Ophelia is the finished version of the previously leaked track phelia. The track describes PinkPantheress getting murdered by her lover. Not only has she expanded her sound but she’s grown as a lyricist. Ophelia is a fictional character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the character in the end is dead by suicide, after getting rejected by the person she was madly in love with. This song paints a heartbreaking love story, where PinkPantheress lies – like Ophelia – in the water, reminiscing about the past feelings she had for her lover with the track ending with the bubbles of her drowning.
To contrast her EP, Heaven Knows comes with features. These include her viral remix, Boy’s A Liar Pt. 2 featuring drill artist Ice Spice, nicknamed “The People’s Princess,” Bury Me, featuring R&B artist Kelela, as well as Nice to meet you featuring Central Cee. The music video for Nice to meet you dropped as part of celebration for the album release. Co-produced by PinkPantheress and Cash Cobain, the song is about devotion to her partner with a verse from one of the UK’s hottest artists, Central Cee. A component you can find in this album as well as her other songs is drill/jersey club elements. The music video is drenched in the frutiger metro aesthetic, which adds to the nostalgia found in her music.
With this album, PinkPantheress has evolved from a baby bird to a flourishing dove. She’s developed her UK garage and breakbeat sound and has mixed it with R&B and pop, moving on to use instrumental sounds like organs, rock-inspired drums, and harps. Heaven Knows expands her ability as a writer and artist and it’s without question that this debut album has solidified her as an artist that is here to stay.
