The Musicians Who Sound Like Machines
One of the great promises of artificial intelligence is that it will open new frontiers of creative expression—but so far, it is most famous for impersonating the artists we already have. In music, machine learning has made headlines for replicating Drake—our most algorithmic star already—and for plopping John Lennon into an overproduced modern rock song. None of these efforts has sounded exactly right, exactly un-creepy. They’re close enough to “accurate” to startle, yet far enough away to suggest what would be lost were AI to render the human voice obsolete.
Another trend has felt like a response: As machines have come closer to sounding like us, we have come closer to sounding like them. Musicians have costumed themselves into robots for a long time—first as a sci-fi lark, with the vocoder in the 1970s, and then for all sorts of expressive chaos, with Auto-Tune in the 21st century. The new album by PinkPantheress, one of Gen Z’s most exciting new stars, encapsulates another, and ascendant, aesthetic of intelligent artificiality: blank cheer. It’s the sound of a deeply feeling person coveting the callousness of a computer.
A 22-year-old Brit who has thus far kept her name private, PinkPantheress blinked into public consciousness in early 2021, when so many of us felt that our brains were trapped in digital ether. The songs she posted to SoundCloud and TikTok used sampled loops of garage as well as drum and bass, frenzied styles of dance music that peaked in the ’90s and early 2000s. But though the tempo of her music was fast, the vibe was placid. PinkPantheress sang in a sweet, absent-minded vocal tone that, to my ear, recalled text-to-speech technology. If you were feeling anxious or twitchy, she was like a helper bot, matching your pulse while calming your neurons.
Earlier this year, she landed a No. 3 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, called “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2.” The track featured another hot newcomer, the Bronx rapper Ice Spice, and their team-up seemed to confirm that PinkPantheress’s sound fit a broader cultural mood. Exemplifying a style of hip-hop known as drill, Ice Spice’s songs pair earthquaking beats with her cool, monotonous flow. “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” also drew from another buzzy rap subgenre, Jersey club, whose rhythms both pulsate and glide, Energizer Bunny–style.
PinkPantheress’s debut album, Heaven Knows, is a set-it-and-forget-it experience, filling the air with prettiness and repressed yearning. Employing major-label resources—the producer Greg Kurstin, an ally of Adele and Kelly Clarkson, worked on a few tracks—PinkPantheress brings in bursts of heavy metal (a guitar solo on the opener, “Another Life”), ’60s pop (“True Romance”), and Timbaland-style R&B (“Feelings”). But for the most part, these new ingredients act like colors in a tie-dye machine, enriching a predictable swirl. PinkPantheress’s voice, flat and kind, laminates all it touches.
Oddly enough, that voice mostly sings about death. The album’s opening stanza addresses a lifeless lover: “Can you please wake up, babe? / Now you’re scaring me … Guess you died today?” Her delivery gives no indication of her distress, and the chorus is an aural shrug (“Guess I’ll see you in another life”). On another track, “Ophelia,” she’s the one who’s meeting her demise, to cutesy harp picking. Other songs seem to be about having a crush, but her lyrics suggest stalkerish intensity and debilitating heartbreak. “I based my life on your face, your everything,” she sings on “Blue,” as electronic manipulation turns the edge of her syllables glitchy and lumpen.
These gothic themes help explain what PinkPantheress’s art is really up to. Like a lot of members of her generation, she grew up listening to emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, which sang of sadness and anger in grand, dramatic style. But also like a lot of members of her generation, she’s fascinated by mainstream kitsch of the early 2000s: mall fashions, formulaic pop. In a recent TikTok, she joked about how she’d undergone a makeover from emo to basic. Her music fits that idea—she’s disguising, disassociating from, pain. The mood is light, but the poignance is heavy: She can’t escape from having a soul.
Similar impulses seem to be playing out all over culture lately. The hyperpop pioneer Hannah Diamond just put out an incredibly catchy album, Perfect Picture, whose songs are stiff in a self-aware way; Diamond pines to be a pixel on a screen, or a poster on the wall. A 2023 single by Grimes, a clear predecessor of PinkPantheress, is self-explanatorily called “I Wanna Be Software.” Then there’s Barbie, whose soundtrack features the gorgeous PinkPantheress song “Angel.” The movie is about objects yearning to be human, but the cultural phenomenon it sparked is about humans yearning to be objects. As synthetic forces continue to compete with the living, plastic fantasies will offer only more comfort.