Rating: 4/5 stars

English musician PinkPantheress (“Angel”) has not changed much after reaching the mainstream. Her remix of her bubblegum pop banger “Boy’s a liar” with Ice Spice (“Barbie World”) topped the Billboard Hot 100, giving her both commercial success and enough pop cred to feature on the recent “Barbie” soundtrack. Fame has not tampered with her humble personality, however, or at least the one fans extrapolate from her low-budget music videos and hyper-minimalist tracks. She released “Mosquito” on Sept. 29, which has everything a PinkPantheress fan would want, and might be all they really need.

Like most of her songs, “Mosquito” indulges in brevity and simplicity to a degree that PinkPantheress refuses to surpass the three-minute mark. She builds the song from a harp that sounds straight out of GarageBand and a breakbeat straight from 2000s Limewire. As much as it sounds like a ringtone, “Mosquito” deserves to precede all of your important phone calls. 

PinkPantheress’ tinny voice laments unrequited love to even the worst earbuds. While her music updates on UK garage electronica, the more saccharine trend of 2000s electronica, her hyperbolic lyrics evoke the emo side of the era. “I just had a dream I was dead/And I only cared/’cause I was taken from you,” she sings on the hook of the chorus. Curiously, the song makes no reference to mosquitoes. Maybe PinkPantheress feels like a mosquito swatted by whoever inspired the song, discarded so quickly.

The music video serves less to tell a story but to give a vibe–if there is any word that explains the appeal of PinkPantheress’ music among Gen Z, it is “vibe.” The singer indulges in a mall binge with her actress friends, even buying a fake pigeon on display, whom she affectionately credits as Pünktchen the Pigeon. Luxury fashion brands Valentino and Fendi must have paid for the egregious product placement, given their logos’ prominent placement midway through the video on PinkPantheress and her friends’ shopping bags. The video is aesthetically cute and implies PinkPantheress uses binge shopping to cope with the breakup. It is a mixed message that can confuse the viewer even more with the odd “Mosquito” title. It is strange having such luxurious scenery paired with the gross and annoying label of a mosquito.

Indie pop fans should not expect anything new from PinkPantheress’ new single, but the song is catchy enough that anybody who complains about its sameness is missing something. Instead, her unique garage pop style remains uncompromised in a music industry full of monotony.

Image from PinkPantheress via YouTube