The visuals hit before the words do — and suddenly you're back in 2005 without knowing how you got there.
You probably don't know the full story behind PinkPantheress — and honestly, it's one of the most fascinating origin stories in music right now. Born in Bath, England and raised in Kent, her real name is Victoria Beverly Walker, aka PinkPantheress — and she started making music young, producing songs in her university dorm room late at night using GarageBand, posting them quietly to SoundCloud where they barely registered. The music was good. The audience just wasn't there yet.
So in December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, she turned to TikTok — posting a snippet of a song she'd recorded in her dorm, phone held up to her face half-obscuring it, with the caption "day 2 of posting my song until someone notices." It went viral almost immediately. She had figured out the algorithm, she knew her sound, and she knew the moment was right — because the pandemic had cracked open something in all of us, a deep hunger for the early 2000s, for music that sounded like it belonged on an iPod with cable headphones, worn on the bus in 2005. PinkPantheress had been making exactly that all along. She called it herself: New Nostalgia. By 2021 she was signed. By 2022 she was BBC's Sound of the Year. The world simply caught up.
"Every time I listen to a PinkPantheress song I feel alive and eager to do more. That is what great pop music is supposed to do — and she does it every single time."
Girl Like Me is the fullest expression of everything she does so well — and the video, directed by LAUZZA, is where the nostalgia stops being a reference and becomes a full world. It opens with a cameo from UK television icon Davina McCall in a mock talk show setting — unmistakably British, instantly time-warping — before pulling PinkPantheress out into a surreal London landscape of nondescript houses and bus stops that somehow feel more cinematic than any grand location ever could. The VFX is stunning without announcing itself: buildings split, space shifts, reality bends just enough to feel like a memory rather than a dream. The styling matches that logic beat for beat. PinkPantheress moves through the video in looks that feel pulled directly from a 2005 wardrobe — cropped layers, clashing prints, the kind of aughts-coded combinations she has always championed in her personal style, from Chopova Lowena carabiner skirts to vintage Vivienne Westwood. Nothing is costume-y or ironic. It all just looks like her, which is exactly why it hits so hard.
There is something bigger happening too, and Girl Like Me sits right at the centre of it. Fashion and music are both turning away from the clean lines of minimalism — not abandoning it, but reaching past it for something with more texture and more feeling. The world slowly returning to its favourite jeans, amazing sunglasses, a long sleeve shirt, and the kind of music that makes all of it feel intentional. PinkPantheress, with her instinct for melancholy wrapped in something almost euphoric, soundtracks that return better than anyone working right now.
When she sings "let it all go" you want to do exactly that. Not because the lyric is complicated, but because the feeling she builds around it — the production, the atmosphere, the specific sadness that somehow makes you feel better — earns the instruction completely. That is the mark of a songwriter who understands that emotion in pop music is not about words. It is about the world you build around them. PinkPantheress builds worlds. We are so glad she pointed that phone at her face in a dorm room on Christmas Day 2020 — because that was the moment everything started, for her and for all of us. Kudos, always.