For someone who protested too much at the top about how she’s not a fan of overly spicy food, PinkPantheress easily worked her way up the Scoville scale on her Hot Ones appearance this week. In fact, she was so chill she had time to praise host Sean Evans for his thoughtful, deeply researched questions and ask him about his taste in British music while hardly breaking a sweat.
Halfway through her heat challenge, the 25-year-old Canterbury, U.K. native did admit, however, that when she started her career seven years ago she never imagined she’d still be burning up the charts today. “When I first started, I remember being told, ‘your career isn’t gonna be a one or two year, it should be a 10-year career.’ And I was like, ‘oh really?,’” she recalled thinking. “I didn’t expect to make it even five years by the way. I didn’t, but we’re still here. And I’m on Hot Ones.”
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The “Boy’s a Liar” singer boasted that her half-Kenyan heritage makes her “not unfamiliar with spice,” while fessing up that when she visits the popular South African chicken restaurant chain Nando’s she goes for the mildest Peri Tamer sauce, even as she stared down the formidable row of progressively scorching sauces in front of her.
Though she’s been open about struggling with stage fright in the past, the singer said she’s gotten much more confident and in the groove on stage over the past year or so, mostly because she realized she has to be the one in charge of the energy flow. “When I used to perform on stage I would act as if the audience were in charge. So I would let them dictate how I perform,” she explained.
“So if they weren’t enjoying it, I’d be like, ‘oh they’re not enjoying it, I’m not going to go out there.’ But then as time went on, I think somebody once basically drilled into my head that I have to be the person that dictates them, not the other way around,” she added. “And so even when you are on stage and you’re like everybody jump, like they jump. So it’s like you literally can just like you just need to own it.”
After gamely building her ultimate imaginary “perfect singer songwriter” — Lily Allen’s, melodies, Frou Frou’s beats and Chief Keef’s rule-breaking — Pantheress said she doesn’t think a songwriter has to have experienced everything they sing about, though pilfering other people’s stories is a no-go. “That being said, I don’t think you should appropriate any stories that … I don’t think we need to sing about everything,” she said, citing SZA’s “Kill Bill” as an example.
“Obviously she [SZA] didn’t kill her — I just think I love storytelling in such an abstract way. I have a song about drowning in a bathtub,” she noted about her 2023 Heaven Knows track “Ophelia.” That prompted host Evans to wonder if she had actually drowned in a tub. “Well, you don’t know that,” Pantheress said with a cheeky smile.
For the record, she was doing fine until she tried “Da Bomb,” (Scoville level 135,600), which sent her fishing for a glass of water, ice to chew on and a cup of ice cream after Evans sweetly reminded her not to touch her eyes with her sauce-covered fingers. And, as game as she was until that point, when it came to the XXX Salsa Vibes wing (Scoville level 820,000), Pantheress was not feeling the vibe at all, though Evans praised her for easily running the wings of death gauntlet with a smile and good cheer.
The singer who recently wrapped up her An Evening With … PinkPantheress tour in support of the 2025 Fancy That mixtape has a handful of festival gigs lined up this summer in Denmark (0 Days Festival, July 30), San Francisco (Outside Lands, Aug. 8) and London (All Points East, Aug. 22).
Watch PinkPantheress on Hot Ones below.
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