PinkPantheress – Illegal

Her name is Pink and we’re really glad to blurb her…

[Video]
[8.00]

Nortey Dowuona: It’s really nice to meet you too! (And nice to meet you again, Aksel Arvid. Keep up the good work.)
[10]

Joshua Lu: PinkPantheress’s strength lies not just in her chicness or humor, but also in how she’s a giant nerd; you could dedicate a whole Wikipedia subsection to her love for Lucas Pope games, Rhythm Heaven, and random anime. These qualities seep into her music, and Fancy That‘s longer song lengths and increased cohesion set up a grander stage for her stylish nerdiness. “Illegal,” the mixtape’s opener and its latest viral hit, takes the whole “Your Love is My Drug” thing and makes it actually about drugs: exciting, but risky enough to deserve prohibitive legislation. She’s self-assured, she’s aloof, she’s a little turned on. All these feelings meld expertly into that glacially smooth beat, undergirded with Danganronpa-esque synths via an Underworld sample (the kind of sample only a big nerd could conjure), as she cooly delivers hooks upon hooks. It feels both effortless and meticulously constructed, and it remains a true bright spot in mainstream music this summer.
[9]

Will Adams: The Underworld synths sound like puffs of smoke, the switch to the 4×4 beat at the end feels like the high kicking in, and Pink’s lightly scandalized delivery of “it feels illegal” embodies the carefree mood that makes her work so effective.
[7]

Alfred Soto: With the ghosts of early ’90s techno going boogedy in the form of those high synths and the microbeats of late ’00s dubstep clattering behind her, PinkPantheress assumes a come-all-ye-faithful posture. “Illegal” does less interesting things with her squelched goo-goo doll delivery: less a song than a warm bath.
[6]

Claire Biddles: [extremely 37-year-old voice] I’m not on TikTok but this has the enigmatic-addictive clippiness that I associate with my idea of TikTok — once is never enough, stuck in your head but you can’t figure out why, wait is that a sample of something I heard in a youth club in Wakefield in 1999 [complimentary]
[7]

Ian Mathers: Oh hey, it’s one of the songs that I mentioned hootering and/or hollering about last time she was here. And I like it even more now that the familiarity of the sample has worn off a bit (as it inevitably does, cf. Sleigh Bells’ “Rill Rill” and Wu-Tang’s “I Can’t Go to Sleep” for two other songs I love that use big identifiable chunks of songs I also love, which also no longer just make me think of their source). I gave one of the songs from this LP that I didn’t immediately lose my shit for an [8]; it’s only up from there.
[10]

Claire Davidson: I underrated “Tonight” on first blush, which I know because, in the months that have passed since writing my initial blurb, literally every part of that song has been stuck in my head at some point. Having listened to Fancy That a handful of times, “Illegal” has always struck me as solidly mid-tier, mostly because it lacks the hooky immediacy that characterizes the project’s spontaneous love affair. The track trades PinkPantheress’s giddy earworm potential for fuzzy synth pads that, for all the space they consume in the mix, feel oddly one-note, simply due to how few sonic embellishments she adds during the runtime. There’s still some cute, winking charm that keeps “Illegal” afloat, but I’m still left wishing that “Stateside” was the cut that went massively viral instead — but, hey, there’s always Amnesty Week for that.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The grandeur here is, ultimately, borrowed — but still, this is the first PinkPantheress song to sound like an arena-filler, her ever-clever vocals dancing between the colossal pillars of sound that she lifts from last century’s techno hits. Her whole schtick has always been about play-acting the role of pop star, but she’s played the imitation game long enough, now, that she fits into that niche perfectly.
[9]