The Escape Artist

PinkPantheress blew up anonymously on TikTok. Now, her Y2K dance-pop influences the masses.

- Cat Zhang

THE 1 TRAIN HAS been hijacked. A heroic passenger in Guess jeans and UGGs pats down the steel walls of her subway car, determined to break into the conductor’s cabin and activate the emergency brakes before the train careers off the tracks. She fiddles with dials, rummages through under-seat compartments, and wriggles her right hand into a mysterious hole that conceals a lever inside a metal labyrinth. Her whale tail plays peekaboo as she inspects things and then straightens up again. Though the clock is ticking, the woman appears unstressed. She moves with the glazed, indifferent look of a teenager playing Candy Crush under the table at a mandatory family function.

The woman is PinkPantheress, the quasi-anonymous British artist and TikTok sensation who introduced normie Americans to the U.K. underground with mini, powder-dusted takes on garage and drum and bass during the pandemic. Since then, she has become a vanguard figure in popular music, ushering in a wave of breakbeat pop. At 23, she is unwillingly upheld as the epitome of her age demographic. To skeptics, she and her two-minute songs portend a youth-attention collapse. “People think of me as some sort of Gen-Z final boss,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Like, ‘Oh my God, she’s trying to ruin the minds of the kids.’”