Once upon a time, artists used to release singles, albums and maybe the odd EP, and we all knew where we were. These days, though, there’s also the mixtape - a collection of songs that, to all intents and purposes, might seem like an album, but for some reason isn’t.
Of course, the concept of the mixtape isn’t new - we were all making compilation cassettes for our friends and would-be more-then-friends back in the ‘80s and ‘90s - but over the past decade, it’s become increasingly common for an artist (particularly one at the start of their career) to release a mixtape that contains original material.
Which brings us to PinkPantheress, who has dropped a new mixtape, Fancy That, today. This is her second full-length release to be classified as such, the first being 2021’s To Hell With It. However, sandwiched between these two projects there was also an album, 2023’s Heaven Knows, so the inevitable question is: what’s the difference?
“The only difference for me between me calling it an album and a mixtape is what I went into it thinking it was,” PinkPantheress tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “So if I went in thinking it was an album, then I would have gone into it with that mindset. And it probably would have been different in some ways, whether it was less samples… whether my lyrics would be a bit more cohesive.”
There are certainly plenty of samples and interpolations on Fancy That - the likes of Underworld, Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada and William Orbit are all referenced in one way or another - and Lowe also put it to PinkPantheress (AKA Victoria Walker) that calling it a mixtape may have given her a little more freedom in the studio, with less pressure to make some kind of grand statement.
“There's no rigid structure between, in my opinion, what makes this too different from an album,” says PinkPantheress. “It's just what I went in thinking it was.”
Whatever it is, it’s certainly breezy, clocking in at just over 20 minutes long. But in the streaming era, pretty much anything goes - Andre 3000’s surprise collection of piano sketches, which landed earlier this week, isn’t exactly conventional - and if the songs land with PinkPantheress’s predominantly Gen-Z audience, they won’t care what format they came in.
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