PinkPantheress speaks for a different kind of fan.
The UK singer sat down with Complex’s Please Explain, telling host Aria Hughes at around the 22:30 mark that she feels like there’s “a group of people which I represent that are just shy girls.”
“I think that we're not allowed to be shy enough sometimes,” PinkPantheress continued. “Another thing about being a pop star is you always need to be the super confident figure that's perfect. And again, being from the UK, so many of my favorite pop stars were not perfect beings. … Sometimes they were unglamorous. Sometimes they were messy.
She added, “Being shy is a secret power for me because I feel like there's a lot of girls out there that are just as shy who also feel like they need to be represented. And I feel like I do that for them. I do feel like when I get to meet my fans, I feel very, very similar to them. I get so many comments where they're like, ‘You feel like my older sister.’ And that makes me happy ‘cause I'm like, ‘That makes me feel good.’ I would rather be your older sister than someone that you saw as unattainable.”
The 24-year-old recently made headlines for almost canceling her NPR Tiny Desk Concert when she discovered she couldn’t use autotune during her performance. She ultimately chose to move forward with the performance and played a stripped-down set of her songs, which included “Pain,” “Tonight,” and her viral TikTok hit “Illegal.”
“This is my first performance I’ve done with no tuning,” she said during the show. “I’ve never sung with no tuning before, so this is really scary. I nearly didn’t do this because the NPR people were like, ‘You can’t use anything.’ Then I was like, ‘Let me try to figure it out and see how it goes.'”