To Hell With It

PinkPantheress’s To Hell With It is her debut mixtape, released October 15, 2021, through Parlophone and Elektra Records. Its ten tracks run just over 18 minutes, combining UK garage, drum and bass, jungle, and bedroom pop into miniature songs that often disappear before reaching a conventional second verse. Breathy, close-recorded vocals sit above rapid breakbeats and familiar samples, creating a contrast between dancefloor energy and lyrics about anxiety, romantic fixation, and emotional withdrawal. Its defining quality is intimacy: rather than competing with the busy production, PinkPantheress sounds as though she is quietly confiding in the listener, making decades-old club sounds feel personal and immediate. The brevity that helped these songs circulate on TikTok also becomes an aesthetic choice, leaving hooks and unresolved feelings hanging in the air.

“Pain” opens by reshaping Sweet Female Attitude’s “Flowers” into a wistful account of unrequited attachment, while “I Must Apologise” threads its restless melody through the keyboard figure from Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman.” “Last Valentines” takes a darker turn, looping guitar from Linkin Park’s “Forgotten,” and “Just for Me” pairs sweet, singsong phrasing with unsettling romantic obsession. The later tracks widen the emotional range: “All My Friends Know” approaches anxiety through a gently bouncing arrangement, while “Nineteen” borrows strings from Toco’s “Outro Lugar” for its account of boredom and academic disappointment. Closing “Break It Off” builds around Adam F’s “Circles,” bringing the mixtape’s fusion of buoyant rhythm and fragile delivery into sharp focus. These references function less as nostalgic decoration than as building blocks for a distinct songwriting voice—one that turns brief encounters with familiar sounds into vivid, unfinished emotional scenes.