#35: PinkPantheress, Outbreak Festival, Deftones
More Y2K nostalgia
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This week’s playlist
PinkPantheress — Brixton Academy 16 - 17.06.2025
PinkPantheress makes what you might call Short Form Music. She’s said — to the disdain of some — that she doesn’t listen to albums, only individual songs. Supposedly, early single ‘Just for Me’ took just 4 hours to write, record and complete. And of the ten tracks on her debut To Hell With It (2021), only three are longer than two minutes.
Both the music and its presentation rely on speed, responding positively to the same demands of contemporary platforms that many artists baulk at. Spotify demands short music (don’t bore us get to the chorus) — PinkPantheress provides. She was also one of the first artists I can remember who employed the process of posting unfinished material or works in progress onto TikTok, to then release them when they gained traction (which of course, they always did). Although with PinkPantheress, these were usually the finished articles — the snippets were the songs.
Despite this palpable sense of contemporaneity, To Hell With It leaned heavily on 90s and 00s samples — Adam F, Sweet Female Attitude, Linkin Park — bringing these varying anachronisms together into something coherent and mesmerising. The Y2K nostalgia act extended to uploading the video for ‘Just for Me’ to YouTube in a low-quality file, giving the impression of a relic from a time of lower bandwidth. Perhaps the most contemporary thing to do is to yearn for the past.
Musically, the early PinkPantheress formula relied on an emotive yet detached vocal style which sat on top of the frenetic beats. The songs were self-consciously cute, but also kind of sad, uncanny even. In this way, they put me in uneasily in mind of theorist Sianne Ngai’s claims that today, the ‘cute’ is about the “aestheticization of powerlessness” in the face of capitalism. Although maybe PinkPantheress is actually inverting this thesis, showing what power can be claimed by fully leaning into the current platforms of distribution.
Her latest ‘mixtape’ Fancy That (2025) is a comparatively confident affair; a sort of post-Brat house and DnB party album where songs seamlessly sequence into one another. The hooks are still precision engineered and the beats uncannily early 2000s, but there is a palpable sense of looseness and fun, where the earlier work had a hard to place eeriness.
Additionally, by incorporating the Red Phone Box and Crown Jewels on the front cover of Fancy That, PinkPantheress is the latest in a recent lineage of UK-based pop artists — including Stormzy, Central Cee, Nia Archives, Charli XCX and A.G Cook — deploying Britpop-era, UK-oriented imagery (mostly Union Jacks) in the 2020s, just as the international prestige and stream share of British pop music continues to decline. More aestheticization of dwindling power against impassive market forces.
PinkPantheress plays two nights at Brixton Academy in June, with the Friday now sold out.
Outbreak Festival — 13.06.2025
Outbreak Festival began life as a hardcore punk event, started by two fourteen year olds in a community centre in Sheffield. It has now grown, much like festival headliners Turnstile (who first played Outbreak over ten years ago), from the grassroots into an expansive force: branching out to London for the first time in 2025.
The bill in Victoria Park in a few weeks departs from the hardcore formula in multiple complementary directions, placing alternative bedroom-pop (Alex G) next to frenetic indie rock (Feeble Little Horse), original emo (Sunny Day Real Estate), and danceable art-rock (Model / Actriz), while the heavier side of things is covered off by post-hardcore (Turnstile), metalcore (Knocked Loose), and the jacked-up hip-hop of Danny Brown. An extremely welcome new entry onto London’s day festival scene.
Deftones — Crystal Palace Park, 29.06.2025
In 2023 the New York Times asked “Are You Ready? The Nu-Metal Renaissance is Upon Us”, claiming that young people were finding and engaging with Nu-Metal music — specifically the music of Deftones — on short form video platforms.
Nu-Metal was a turn of the millennium phenomenon. At the time, the record sales would clearly indicate that many of its leading artists — Korn, Limp Bizkit, Deftones, System of a Down, Linkin Park — were some of the biggest bands in the world. The Nu-Metal sound was defined by combining elements of metal or alternative rock — drop-tuning guitar riffs, screamed vocals — with some surface effects from hip-hop: rapping, turntablism, sampling. The bands synthesised this genre melding into a shiny pop package: in 1999 MTV played Limp Bizkit videos almost as frequently as those by Britney Spears or The Backstreet Boys, in response to the demands of an angry frat contingent who wanted to see more of themselves represented on the screen.
The Nu-Metal genre arguably peaked — and imploded — at the Woodstock 99 festival, where many of its prominent artists played. Woodstock 99 was an installation of the Woodstock franchise, 30 years on from the original iteration. But where the original Woodstock has been remembered as a countercultural force, carrying a kind of peace-and-love political message, a template for all left-field musical utopianism, Woodstock 99 — which took place on a disused airbase — ended in rioting, violence and arson.
For their part, Deftones — who declined to play at Woodstock 99 — distanced themselves from the Nu-Metal brand, disowning the genre label. It’s true they incorporated very little of the hip-hop influences that would define their peers. Of the track ‘Back to School’ — which stands out in their discography as having rapped verses — vocalist Chino Moreno explained that it was made to appease the desires of the record company to have a hit single on the record:
“And so I rapped a hip hop part on that song, we shortened it and half an hour later, the hit-single was ready to roll on. “When this version came out, a little part inside all of us felt like: 'Fuck! We just totally compromised.' And I know that a lot of our fans felt bad about it too.”
It’s a classic music industry story; genre is legible, sellable, and amplified wherever possible, even where it may not actually exist.
Deftones’ discography in fact goes far beyond ‘Back to School’ or the now viral ‘Change (in the House of Flies)’. At times, it’s more post-rock influenced — ‘Minerva’, ‘Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event’ — and others more classic metal — ‘Swerve City’, ‘Romantic Dreams’. In fact, the band have explicitly stated that they derive significant influence from British music of the 80s, especially the New Romantic movement. Accordingly, they’ve released covers of The Cure, The Smiths, Duran Duran and Japan. New Romantic music is a far cry from the band’s heavier tracks, but once you hear echoes of David Sylvian’s oblique songwriting and affected vocal style in Deftones music, you can’t un-hear them.
Per the NYT article, it does seem that Deftones have experienced a rise in popularity, or at least a rise in mainstream acceptance recently, especially here in the UK, be it TikTok related or due to their consistency and endurance among a dedicated fanbase — they’re now in their fourth decade of releasing music and touring. They quickly sold out their Crystal Palace park show (a few resale tickets remain, link below) and will play a prominent slot at Glastonbury the following day in late June. For its part, Glastonbury very rarely programs heavy music, more Woodstock — at least in its own self image — than Woodstock ’99.
(Also see Cantilever’s piece on Glastonbury from 2023 here)
Ephemera
Peasant zine issue 1 out now ‘Music Emerging from the Soil’ - a musical spin-off from
including writing on Daisy Rickman (see our take here) and perhaps taking its title from the incredible Richard Dawson album? (again, our take here). Long live print media!