PinkPantheress discusses how she found the courage to pursue music

Last week, PinkPantheress released her long-awaited debut album, Heaven knows. In the run up to the release, she's collaborated with the likes of Troye Sivan, Ice Spice, and Destroy Lonely, as well as have her song "Angels" featured on the soundtrack to Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie.

Speaking to Zane Lowe, she revealed that she was an emo when she was younger. That was the point in her life where she realised that music could influence her entire personality. "I was friends with all the emos at my school, and that was really my life," she explained. "Music ruled my life to the point when they started listening to other music, I then joined them and started listening to the other bits of music they were... So, we all made this transition together from emo to this genre, to this genre, we all made it together."

Despite the strong influence that the music she was listening to would have over her, she has been aware of the power of authenticity.

"The artists that I have looked at during my own career and looked at and thought, “wow, they've really done it in a way which I think is beautiful and effortless”…. Those are the people where I've realised they haven't really had to convince anybody about anything. They've just kind of been themselves," she said. 'When I was emerging out from my shell of not really showing my face and then showing my face, I realised that it felt easy because people were telling me what I was. I didn't have to be like, this is what I am. And their assumptions were correct. It was like, "Yes, I am this shy girl from this small city in the UK. I was an emo. I do dress like this. I do have this kind of humor."

PinkPantheress tells Lowe that the reason she found the courage to do music, was because of her "desperation to be successful". She reveals that she was really shy when she was younger, and there was a period of time at the age of 18 where she had to decided between going to university or doing her dream job. By the time she was 19, she felt like time was running out, which gave her the pressure to figure things out.

"I actually wanted to be a flipping film editor. I wanted to be in films. There was even part of me that wanted be an actress," she confesses. "There was part of me that just wanted to be someone successful so I can just be happy about the success that I've built for myself. I knew I didn't want to have a job where I wasn't sure about my success. I wanted it to be like, okay, I'm doing this job and I'm good at it."

She first felt like she succeeded at this when her first TikTok blew up, because she set out for it to be strictly used for musical purposes. "When I first posted my first snippet, and it didn't go viral – this is the thing, I hate the “viral" [thing] – but when I had the first few hundred comments being like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." I was like, okay, success. The relationship is real, and I can trust my ears – because I thought this was good when I made it, or I thought it was good enough – and then people were confirming it for me. So I was like, 'Okay, good. This is great'."