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F<\/span>rom the look of the crowd at PinkPantheress<\/a>\u2019s show in Brooklyn last night, you\u2019d be forgiven for thinking that King Charles<\/a> had extended his recent trip<\/a> to New York. The crowd that snaked its way through a never-ending circuit of cracked asphalt and grimy water on their way to Brooklyn Storehouse wore union jacks and tartan miniskirts, which you could imagine would be in line with royal protocol for how to dress when a sovereign visits a warehouse rave.<\/p>\n PinkPantheress is certainly royalty among a vast swath of young, terminally online people; a pop princess who is mainstream enough to clinch top billing at Coachella<\/a> and perform on primetime TV, but whose taste has always leaned more niche and left-field than anything that would ever go platinum. Or would it? Pop music is always in a state of flux but we\u2019re living through an interesting period of realignment. Chalk it up to AI backlash, a floundering music industry or fatigue with chart-gaming reindeer games, but lately a raft of musicians who\u2019d played nice for years have seen big rewards going for broke with wildly adventurous work. Performers like Slayyyter<\/a>, Zara Larsson<\/a> and Jade<\/a>, who\u2019d once been siloed off as \u201cpop\u2019s middle class<\/a>\u201d or incarcerated in the \u201cKhia asylum<\/a>\u201d have been rewarded twice over for their boldness with both critical acclaim and charting hits. PinkPantheress is something of a figurehead among these artists and one of its brightest hopes. Her show yesterday night at Brooklyn Storehouse doubled as a flex of her star power and a mini-music festival highlighting a wave of like-minded musicians who are just as poised to break out.<\/p>\n Before Pink took to the stage at Brooklyn Storehouse, Underscores lit the place on fire with her stammering, maximalist riff on hyperpop. Ditto The Dare, the first of two twink performers to take to the stage in skinny suits. His set was bass-heavy and slinky, finding a scummy, lascivious edge to songs like Addison Rae\u2019s Fame Is a Gun and leveraging it to its full crowd-pleasing potential. But what really set people over the edge was his final song, a preview of his collaboration with Charli xcx, Rock Music<\/a>, which immediately prompted everyone in sight to raise their phones and record.<\/p>\n Looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment I first began to think PinkPantheress might be an actual genius. \u201cWhat is something the fans don\u2019t know about you?\u201d a disembodied street interviewer asked the singer<\/a>. \u201cOK, I\u2019m bald underneath, I have a shaved head,\u201d she deadpans to the camera, gesturing at her fringe: \u201cThis is a wig, I\u2019m bald literally<\/em>.\u201d If the received idea of pop stardom is that it rests on a performer\u2019s well-kept vanity, it\u2019s much rarer for an artist to undercut it altogether. PinkPantheress is one of the greatest self-inventors in contemporary pop music, an artist who has squared her eccentricity with style and played a brilliant hand in becoming her own cartoon. Chatty, bonkers and a never-ending source of meme fodder, she\u2019s as compelling a pop star as she is a comic figure<\/a>; someone you could equally hold up to divas like Kelela<\/a>, FKA twigs<\/a> and Tinashe, as well as gen Z\u2019s answer to RuPaul, Pee-wee Herman or Mr Bean.<\/p>\n