PinkPantheress Has a Plan.
With rumours of her Hollywood debut in the offing, multiplatinum singer PinkPantheress talks cinema, choreo and transcending TikTok.
PinkPantheress for Perfect Issue 11.
Photographer: Willy Vanderperre
Fashion Editor: Katie Grand
Writer: Amelia White
‘Hello, I’m Vicky.’
It’s a curious way to begin a conversation with someone better known by a name that has, over the last few years, become almost shorthand for an entire corner of the internet. PinkPantheress exists somewhere between artist and algorithm; a musician whose songs have travelled through headphones, TikTok edits, festival fields and bedroom speakers with a velocity that feels almost impossible to chart. She has become one of those rare artists whose work is instantly recognisable yet somehow resistant to over-explanation. Before the Zoom call has barely begun, the mythology gently dissolves. There is no grand entrance. No carefully constructed mystique. Just Vicky.
Our conversation is punctuated by a steady stream of notifications from her phone. They arrive every few minutes without fail, sounding less like interruptions than another instrument in the room. She never reaches to silence them. More noticeably, she never loses her train of thought. Each answer resumes precisely where it left off, as though her mind is quietly processing several conversations simultaneously before deciding which one deserves its full attention.
Later, she inadvertently offers the perfect description of the way she thinks: ‘My brain is a bit of a Notes app sometimes.’ She laughs as she says it, but I spend the rest of the interview quietly testing the theory.
Planning, for Vicky, isn’t about five-year road maps or vision boards. It’s far more immediate than that. ‘It’s more about me like having the next goal in my head.’ She plucks a hypothetical ambition from the air. ‘Let’s say I wanted to randomly get into fashion... essentially it would be blinking in neon pink in my head and I’d be like, get into Fashion Week, get into Fashion Week, get into Fashion Week – then I would spend the next few weeks basically planting the seeds to try and get to that point.’ She laughs, and says it as though there isn't another way of thinking.
That same approach has shaped one of the most visible evolutions in her career. Over the past year, choreography has become an increasingly prominent part of PinkPantheress’s live shows and music videos, but dancing, she admits, wasn't something that came naturally. ‘I’ve always wanted to do choreo,’ she says. ‘It was a case of getting the right choreographers but also finding it in my body as well.’ Being tall, she explains, made her feel disconnected from her own movement. ‘I do feel like I have a lack of control on my extremities,’ she laughs. Rather than abandoning the idea, she committed to it: rehearsals, movement coaches and the quiet repetition that slowly transformed hesitation into confidence. ‘In some of my first shows with choreo, I don’t think my choreo was probably very good,’ she says candidly. ‘But now we’ve reached show 50 or 60, it feels really in my body.’
Confidence, too, arrives through process rather than instinct. When she talks about it, she doesn’t reach for the usual language of self-belief or validation. Instead, she goes back to school. ‘I think going to a girls’ school was the best thing for my confidence,’ she says, and then begins to unpack why. Without the constant presence of boys during those formative years, she explains, there was less pressure to perform a version of herself that might be legible or appealing to someone else. It allowed her to experiment more freely, to make decisions without immediately filtering them through an external gaze. That freedom, she suggests, has lingered. ‘When I was styling myself… if people don’t like it, I don’t really care.’
But she’s careful not to present that confidence as absolute. Almost in the same breath, she admits that it can falter in unfamiliar territory. ‘If someone is very good at a specialist subject that I’m not aware of, I get very insecure.’ It’s a small admission, but an important one. Confidence, in her telling, isn’t a fixed trait but something situational, built through familiarity and undone by its absence. She trusts herself where she has put in the work; elsewhere, she remains open, curious, occasionally unsure.
To date, Vicky's proudest achievement remains winning the 2026 BRIT Award for Producer of the Year – an accolade she speaks about with noticeably more pride than any chart position or headline slot. ‘I definitely wouldn’t call myself the strongest singer,’ she tells me matter-of-factly. ‘For me, it's always been about the production.’ And for Vicky, craft has always come before celebrity. Having taught herself to produce by, as she puts it, ‘faking a resumé’ and learning on the job, she’s already looking towards another creative world she’d like to inhabit. Winning Producer of the Year celebrates the version of Vicky that exists behind the scenes: meticulous, technical, endlessly curious about how things are made.
Film, she says, feels like the natural next chapter. Acting, perhaps. Composing a score. Anything that allows her to be part of it. Growing up, she was introduced to a cinematic vocabulary that would eventually lead her to study film at UAL. ‘My dad got me into Alfred Hitchcock and stuff when I was really young,’ she tells me. ‘And Western movies.’ Years later, that fascination remains entirely intact: she lights up talking about cinema with the same ease that she talks about music, before confessing an enduring love of horror. ‘I’d like to be in the next Saw, if there’s another Saw movie,’ she laughs. ‘I do love Saw.’
PinkPantheress is perhaps the artist most synonymous with internet music, yet she seems fundamentally uninterested in being confined by the internet. The platform that first propelled her into millions of bedrooms has never felt, in her mind, like a permanent home. Even while TikTok was busy flattening artists into 30-second moments, Vicky was already thinking about what came after it.
‘I knew not to rely on TikTok any more,’ she tells me, a conscious decision she made several years ago. Instead, she began encouraging her team to think more broadly about how her music could exist in the world: billboards, guerrilla marketing, physical interventions and the kind of analogue spectacle that predates social media altogether. One campaign to promote her collab track ‘Boy’s a Liar Pt 2’ involved placing mannequins of herself and Ice Spice on rooftops, blurring the line between advertising and public art. ‘I think everything is so cyclical,’ she says. ‘You go forward... Then you have to go back.’ It’s an unusually long view from an artist so often reduced to the speed of the scroll. Rather than treating the internet as an identity, Vicky approaches it the same way she approaches production, choreography or film: another creative system to understand, learn from and, when the time feels right, quietly evolve beyond.
In an era increasingly obsessed with immediacy – where songs become trends before they become memories, careers are built in 30-second increments and success is often mistaken for serendipity – it would be easy to mistake PinkPantheress for an overnight success. The music feels instinctive. Light. Almost impossibly effortless. Spend an hour talking to Vicky, however, and that illusion quietly dissolves. Beneath the brevity of the songs sits someone relentlessly analytical; someone who thinks in systems, in sequences, in next steps rather than giant leaps. Almost nothing is left entirely to chance.
I ask if she’d describe herself as a goals-oriented person or rather someone who takes her chances. ‘I would say everything thus far has been a result of strategy.’ It’s a striking thing to hear from an artist whose career has so often been framed as a product of internet velocity rather than intention. Spend long enough with Vicky and it becomes clear that strategy, in her world, is simply another way of paying attention.
And yet, for all the preparation, the most revealing thing she tells me all afternoon isn't about strategy at all. It’s the quiet confession that, standing in front of the biggest crowds of her career, she sometimes catches herself thinking, ‘How did I end up here?’
By the time we hang up, her phone is still quietly demanding her attention. It has done so throughout our entire conversation, each notification arriving and disappearing without ever interrupting the rhythm of her thoughts. Perhaps that’s the closest thing to understanding Vicky: the thoughts never really stop arriving. Neither, it seems, does the curiosity. For all the planning that has shaped her career, she still leaves room for astonishment – and maybe that's the point. Strategy may explain how PinkPantheress got here… It doesn't explain why Vicky still can’t quite believe it.
