PinkPantheress Opens a Vibrant New Chapter With the Ambitious ‘Heaven Knows’: Album Review
The path from TikTok phenom to career artist is a challenging one, and while 22-year-old British singer-songwriter PinkPantheress has navigated it far better than most, a big test comes with “Heaven Knows,” her first conventional full-length album.
Conventional because her actual debut album, 2021’s excellent “To Hell With It,” squeezed 10 songs into just 18-and-a-half minutes and found the young artist bending pop music’s standards to her TikTok-incubated style: complete songs — with verses and choruses and a bridge — clocking in at 1:48, 1:22, 1:36, with the longest topping out at just over two and a half minutes. But a few months later she dropped “Boy’s a Liar,” one of the biggest singles of this year, the remix of which boosted her into the upper echelons of the charts with no small thanks to Ice Spice, who slipped a saucy rap into the song’s “Pt. 2” remix and still kept the running time at 2:11.
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“Heaven Knows” is a different story. The songs and the list of collaborators are longer and bigger — Pink is the lead producer on nearly every song, but joined by two-time Grammy producer of the year Greg Kurstin (Adele, Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters), Danny L. Harle (Caroline Polachek, Dua Lipa), London on Da Track (Young Thug, Summer Walker), Bnyx (Travis Scott, Drake) and others, with “Boy’s a Liar” collaborator Mura Masa present on most of the songs but usually relegated to an “additional producer” role.
At first blush it might seem that she “brought in some big guns,” but a close listen reveals an ambitious young artist with an imaginative wish list of collaborators, wandering farther from her established sound as the album goes on. Surprisingly, the opening Kurstin-produced tracks are the most familiar-sounding — skittering drum n’ bass beats, rimshots, rubbery bass and atmospheric keyboards laying down a plush but lively featherbed for Pink’s sweet, honeyed vocals. But a few songs in she starts to break formation, exploring bigger beats and hook, bringing a harder-hitting R&B/pop foundation to her style (although her collaboration with Bnyx on “Feelings” landed a maybe little too close to Grimes). Her voice can grow one-dimensional over the course of forty-odd minutes, but it’s balanced with top-shelf features from British rapper Central Cee, Nigerian singer Rema, and best of all American R&B vocal gymnast Kelela’s stellar turn on “Bury Me.”
There’s a whiff of wistful nostalgia in seeing PinkPantheress veer away from micropop, but artists need to evolve and she’s exploring rather than conforming. “Heaven Knows” is a big chapter in what is hopefully a long story.
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