Underworld, Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada and William Orbit: PinkPantheress has sampled the cream of '90s and '00s UK electronic music on new mixtape, Fancy That

Earwormy. Surprising. Always on and always interesting. And… er… short…

Those are just a few choice words that could be used to describe the latest release by TikTok favourite PinkPantheress, an artist who made her name with rapid-fire mini anthems.

Fancy That, her latest mixtape, was released on Friday, and has already found favour. “Simultaneously boiled down yet packed with ideas, fleeting but not lacking, familiar but fresh,” reads Alexis Petridis’s album of the week review in The Guardian.

But exactly what magic is at play here?

First of all there’s the Pantheress’s raging desire to hit it and quit it. Someone obviously once told her never to outstay her welcome.

Super short get-to-the-point intros. Usually a scene-setting intro ‘theme’ that will re-occur through the song… A verse and a chorus… All familiar so far. Then a verse?… Or is it a middle-eight because it’s not the same as the first verse?… Is that another chorus? I thiiiink so… (Are they just making this up as they go along?)… And outro to a (usually abrupt) end. Done.

Good. We hate fade-outs. But everything else? It’s a little – shall we say – unconventional.

Time’s up…

Most pronounced are the song’s durations. Or rather lack of them. The longest track on show here (Tonight) comes in at 2:57, seemingly aware of how close to that fateful three minute barrier it came and wilfully hurrying to make it in before its self-imposed deadline.

Elsewhere we’re almost religiously wrapping up around the 2:30 mark, apart from Noises’ brave dalliance to get the job done in 1:45.

And let’s never forget the giveaway titled Intermission, which proves to be exactly that. Coming in halfway through the album (in slot five) and being just 24 seconds long.

It’s almost a quaint modernist nod to vinyl LPs of old, where the last track at the end of side one (which would appear by necessity halfway through the album) had to both wrap up what had come before and tease what lay ahead.

Thus, with timelines like this, most often, the song is half finished midway through the first chorus. Bass solo? Mate, there’s not even room for a middle eight…

That said, never forget that The Beatles' Love Me Do – a song that defined the structure and staying power of pop music for the 60s and beyond – was two minutes and 22 seconds long. So perhaps by being backwards in looking forwards (and gauging the attention span of her TikTok-loving listenership) the Pantheress may be onto something here.

These are tracks that leave you wanting more. And given that streamers can supply metrics that let you measure success by how often tracks are on repeat, it’s safe to say that Pink must have numbers off the scale…

Repetition. You’re out

And then there’s the ‘small’ matter of the number of samples and lifts on board. Snippets and chunks, familiar refrains and earwormy background moments…

Listening to Fancy That is like the Bits N Pieces round in a pub quiz. “Oh, what’s that bit!? Gimme a minute…” Suddenly the album’s title Fancy That snaps dramatically into focus. Fancy that? Don’t mind if I do…

And while previous sample-based music dug deep into the crates to pull out unheard rare grooves and placed them front and centre, or worked hard to bury them in the mix and hang onto every copyright dollar, Pantheress has a different modus operandi.

This is the musical equivalent of Ready Steady Cook. Here the ingredients are always familiar and easy to work with. They’re never crazily interesting in their own right, but the final dish is always tasty and hot. And if you don’t like it or are beginning to get bored of it, don’t worry, the portions are tiny…

Take, for example, the album opener Illegal which, from its opening second, places its entire music content front and centre in the form of a straight lift from Underworld’s Dark and Long (Dark Train), a 10:53-long track that introduces this musical theme at an interminable 3:05 in (AKA longer than the entire duration of any of PinkPantheress's music) and finally reveals it for sampling at 5:56.

And then there’s the issue of ‘are these samples at all’? Dark and Long? Yeah, most likely. It’s pitched up two semitones on Illegal, and the tempo has risen from 135bpm to 140bpm.

But for Girl Like Me, which features a lift from Romeo by Basement Jaxx? It’s clearly a singalong sound recreation of that track’s “Let it all go” chorus hook. So much so that it’s actually different notes… Jaxx’s original is F Sharp/A Flat, while Pantheress sings F Sharp/A. So if you’re not using the original performance AND you’re changing the notes, why not just change the lyrics too and save yourself paying for the sample or stumping up a writing credit?

It’s an odd conundrum and the answers are potentially numerous. Perhaps Pantheress loved Basement Jaxx so much she reckoned she owed them a credit? Perhaps she couldn’t think of a lyric that fitted rhythmically as well as “Let it all go”? Or – as is increasingly becoming the case – perhaps artists are making so little off streaming that it’s worth giving them a writing credit just to make friends and avoid any kind of legal tussle and revenue hold up down the line.

After all, the streaming profits from Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You were held up for over a year following a legal battle that Sheeran eventually won. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift generously bestowed a credit to Right Said Fred for the vague rhythmic similarity between her Look What You Made Me Do and the Freds' I’m Too Sexy. Potential problem averted. And Beyonce credited the writers of Robyn S’s Show Me Love on her track Break My Soul when it used the same Korg M1 organ sound…

Blame the case of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams' 2013 global smash Blurred Lines, whose writers had to stump up an already pocketed $5 million to the estate of Marvin Gaye’s because it was deemed too close to his Got To Give It Up despite the fact that they "differed in melody, harmony and rhythm". Times are a’changing and PinkPantheress has just shown us the way out.

Elsewhere on the album we’ve got:

• Panic! At The Disco's Do You Know What I'm Seeing on Tonight
• Just Jack’s Starz In Their Eyes and Basement Jaxx's Oh My Gosh on Stars
• Nardo Wick’s Who Want Smoke, Groove Armada’s Suntoucher and Z-3 MC’s Triple Threat on Noises
• William Orbit feat. Sugababes and Kenna’s Spiral and The Streets’ It’s Too Late on Nice to know you
• Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me on Stateside
• Basement Jaxx’s Good Luck on Romeo

Some are front and centre and others barely there to the point where one has to wonder if its inclusion is worth the effort/hassle/money. It’s an odd mix. Literally.

And yet it all works.

The experts are always saying that the first rule of music making is to realise that there are no rules. Looks like one pupil-turned-teacher has learnt that lesson well, and you could do well by attending her class.