Written by With 42 million monthly listeners on Spotify, English pop star and producer PinkPantheress (aka 25-year-old Victoria Walker) is kinda a big deal: her recent single Stateside + Zara Larsson was the biggest song in the world last month, topping both Billboard Global 200 chart and Spotify’s Global Daily Chart. Nice work for someone who was uploading her GarageBand demos to Soundcloud just five years ago.
As telegraphed by her singles Tonight, which samples Panic! At The Disco deep cut Do You Know What I’m Seeing? from Pretty. Odd. and Where You Are, a collab with Willow, which contains a sample of Paramore’s Never Let This Go , PinkPantheress was a huge fan of pop-punk and emo in her teens, and fronted a band who played My Chemical Romance and Paramore covers when she was just 14.
Recently, in an interview with internet personality Derrick Gee, PinkPantheress discussed her love of My Chemical Romance, and played the host the MCR song that she plays to introduce friends to the New Jersey emo superstars, Early Sunsets Over Monroeville, from the quintet’s first record, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.
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“So one thing about My Chemical Romance that I love is that basically all their songs are about loss and dying, or the process of dying,” she explains. “This song, to me, has such a sense of hopelessness and like, it’s a love song… it sounds like these are two people that can’t be together. And there’s also the undertone that he’s a vampire, and they’re vampires.”
“I love Gerard Way!” she continues. “He loves theatre, he loves comics, he loves anything driven by these dark themes around death. This is the song I would show to people if I wanted to sell them on My Chemical Romance.
“The issue with it, though, is that they really don’t have any other song that sounds like this,” she adds. “This first album was probably the most in this bag they got: everything after this is a bit heavier, and a bit more structured, more mainstream, or a bit more rocky, whatever. I really, really like the song, though, it’s beautiful.”
Watch PinkPantheress guest with Paramore onstage at Austin City Limits festival in 2022.
