Photos by Amanda Romankiw
As the U.S. music charts have been swarmed by country music and hollow radio ballads this year, a new kind of British invasion led by women in pop has emerged to save the day for the girls and the gays. Among this class of British pop stars getting their long-overdue mainstream breakthrough is Victoria Beverly Walker, a Y2K-inspired singer, songwriter, and producer who goes by the stage name PinkPantheress. In between her four sold-out shows at The Wiltern last week, she became a two-time Grammy nominee for her 2025 album Fancy That. Sunday’s LA show served as a victory lap by way of dance party that more than proved PinkPantheress is a pop icon here to stay.
It should have come as no surprise given PinkPantheress is one of the youngest artists I’ve seen live this year, but I was still taken aback by how exclusively Gen Z her crowd was. The massive line circling the venue before the show was made up of largely college-aged fans, all decked out in their fanciest attire — plaid skirts and shirts, colorful capris, leather jackets, red tights, fluffy hats, and ballet flats — to match the British accents they would put on for the night. If her British takeover wasn’t already clear, her ability to get a crowd of LA locals to dress like walking Union Jacks should have sealed the deal. It’s quite remarkable that despite appealing to such a trendy, young fanbase, the 24-year-old has simultaneously managed to gain the respect of critics and industry peers based on merit alone. When pop music is great, it’s undeniable and impossible to look away from. Before this year, even I considered myself to be a casual listener of PinkPantheress, but after this year and this show, I’m fully onboard the well-deserved PinkPantheress hype train.
PinkPantheress, along with her DJ, drummer, and dancers (known as the Pinkettes), took the stage at nine o’clock sharp, starting the set off strong with “Stateside” and introducing the thesis of the night with a playful wink: “Never met a British girl, you say?” She performed more of her 2025 output before going into a run of infectious hits from to hell with it and Heaven knows, her debut album which turned two years old during the show. While she may have only truly received her flowers this year, each track served as a reminder of how inescapable PinkPantheress’s rise over the 2020s has been. There’s an equally bubbly and melancholic nostalgia to the Y2K aesthetic she’s wholeheartedly adopted. For Gen Z, this has served as both an escape from and a reminder of the tumultuous times we’ve found ourselves living in during what we were promised would be the best years of our lives. That shared feeling was perhaps best exhibited during “Take Me Home,” a song about a young woman feeling unprepared to enter the real world. “I know that they’ll make an adult of me / I know that I’m not quite ready to be,” she sang on the track back in 2022. But with each single, collab, and TikTok snippet, PinkPantheress was catapulted further and further into that real world; from college dropout to bonafide pop star, she’s proved to the rest of her generation that there might just be hope for us all to find our place in the world eventually.
That kind of relatability makes for lyrics that only feel right when sang loudly and passionately, something that proved especially useful on Sunday; PinkPantheress informed the crowd that some of the songs had been pitched down after she lost her voice, and she needed the audience to help her out a bit. Yet her vocal health didn’t seem to hinder her performance much at all, as one thing PinkPantheress has consistently demonstrated is her uncanny ability to sound identical to her studio recordings. She thanked the crowd for being such great backup singers, and both her and opening DJ Nick Cheo remarked that it was the loudest crowd they’d had so far. The crowd’s noise was certainly undeniable, but their dancing not so much.
At this point, it’s unfortunately to be expected for a Gen Z crowd to be more glued to their phones than their groove at a concert. However, something like that is only exacerbated when the artist they’re there to see is one they were probably introduced to over TikTok, so in a curious, never-ending cycle, they feel an inclination to record the music they found on TikTok in order to make their own TikTok. On some level, it just feels antithetical to the spirit of a PinkPantheress concert to be on the mission for the perfect video, as some of the best footage I’ve seen come out of this tour are grainy, out-of-focus videos taken on a Nintendo 3DS with abominable bass-boosted audio. TikTok aside, you can rarely win with LA crowds like this, but PinkPantheress’s skill for keeping them engaged and singing with the endless energy of her packed set was a feat in and of itself.
The second half of the show featured more Fancy That songs including “Tonight,” the stellar lead single that marked PinkPantheress’s flawless turn into more mature pop that nonetheless managed to maintain her playful pen and distinctly British production. Additionally, while other pop artists may forgo multiple collaborations in their setlists, PinkPantheress’s dedication to her fans meant that verses from collaborators like Zara Larsson, Ice Spice, and LE SSERAFIM all had a home in the show, allowing the crowd to experience singing along to their favorite lyrics live. Even with the inclusion of some of these iconic collaborations, the concert was at its best when PinkPantheress got to showcase her growth as a solo performer.
Watching her now, it’s hard to believe this is the same artist that used to carry around an emotional support purse on stage. She’s evolved immensely as a live performer in just this past year, which means that these Evening With PinkPantheress shows are complete with outfit changes, dance breaks, skits, and a fan interaction segment where she goes in search of her “Romeo.” She’s more comfortable onstage than ever, and it shows in the fun and free nostalgic energy radiating from her that turned the century-old venue into a time machine to the 2000s. That sweet spot between a dance battle video game and Barbie’s Dreamhouse is what all pop concerts should aim for, and PinkPantheress pulls it off effortlessly.
She took a moment near the end of the night to reflect on all she’s accomplished in 2025, saying, “This is just a great way to round off the news about the Grammys and the shows and everything, celebrating it all here together and just celebrating with a bang.” As she soaked up her success and thanked her fans, a ringtone came over the speakers leading into the now Grammy-nominated viral single “Illegal.” It’s hard to deny PinkPantheress’s British pop princess status when a cacophony of screams followed the opening line: “My name is Pink, and I’m really glad to meet you.”
They’re not totally joking when they say PinkPantheress concerts are over in the blink of an eye. The shows on this tour only clock in at around seventy minutes, but those seventy minutes are truly some of the most fun you’ll have all year. With songs this short, fans are practically guaranteed to get more bang for one’s buck and the chance to hear all their PinkPantheress favorites live.
“Never met a British girl, you say?” Well, PinkPantheress is proving herself to be the future of pop, and in a heartbeat, I’d give the glowing recommendation to see her stateside soon before her star gets bigger and better, and she perhaps even wins a Grammy or two.
Listen to Fancy That below!
