PinkPantheress has millions of views on TikTok. Now she’s an Outside Lands superstar.

A pink haze slowly creeps over the Sutro Stage just after 8:45 p.m. on the second night of Outside Lands, bass booming in time with pulsating lights. A mom grabs her teenage daughter’s elbow and tells her not to move, but when the unmistakable plinkety rhythm of “Stateside” fills the air, chaos erupts: bag charms go flying, a headband with a sprout affixed to it is crushed in the grass, and throngs of mostly high schoolers and 20-somethings mob the barricades.  

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The song by electro-alternative British pop artist and producer PinkPantheress, 25, may be about a long-distance fixation on an American crush. But it’s taken on a life of its own. A standout track from her sophomore mixtape released in 2025, “Fancy That,” it melds samples of Adina Howard’s 1995 R&B hit “Freak Like Me” with a collage of video game sound effects, specifically the level up chime from Kingdom Hearts and the codec ringtone from Metal Gear Solid. A remix of the track with Swedish pop singer-songwriter Zara Larsson charted at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 in March after it was chosen by Alysa Liu for her now-viral figure skating performance at the Winter Olympics. 

Wearing a sparkly burgundy crop top with low-rise jeans and ballet flats, PinkPantheress oozes confidence as she bellows the name of the track to her adoring fans, surrounded by backup dancers dressed in red. She even swaps out one of her lyrics from “never met a British girl, you say?” to “never met a San Fran boy,” but it’s so charming no one seems to mind her use of the term.

It’s impressive to see how far she’s come from the performer who was so nervous to be on stage she carried a purse with her as a crutch during the entirety of her set at Portola in 2022 — something she jokes about during this show. The bass goes into overdrive and swooping patterns rise and fall on the projected screen behind her as she races into the Panic! at the Disco-sampling “Tonight,” then heart-on-her-sleeve track “Pain,” each song lasting no longer than a couple of minutes during her hourlong set.

“Omg, hello everybody, how are we doing?” she gushes to the crowd from behind the decks, thanking fans for choosing her set as the Strokes played across the park. 

Born Victoria Beverley Walker in 2001, PinkPantheress started making music using Garage Band when she was 17 years old, but sang in a pop punk band even earlier than that, covering the likes of My Chemical Romance, Green Day and Paramore. Seeing Hayley Williams perform at Reading Festival was what inspired the groundbreaking Gen Z artist to take her hobby to new heights. Though her sound may be largely defined by breakbeat loops and drum and bass with a K-pop sensibility, there’s an undeniably emo edge that drives her vulnerable lyricism. 

Her father, a statistics professor, raised her on classic movies, ranging from Westerns like “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” and Alfred Hitchcock staples including “Psycho” and the San Francisco-shot “Vertigo,” the latter of which she has called her all-time favorite film. The experiences motivated her to pursue film school in London, with dreams of becoming a film editor. But as she began editing DIY tracks late into the night in her university dorm room, anonymously releasing them on TikTok, she became an overnight sensation and realized music was her true passion. 

PinkPantheress still uses the platform regularly, sometimes making tutorials for fans on her recording process (she’s since moved onto Logic), breaking down each chord, how she pitches up the audio and speeds it up or slows it down. She has described her process as quick, making many of her songs in the span of a few hours and collaborating with a handful of producers. For “Fancy That,” she received mentorship in the studio from English electronic duo Basement Jaxx, as well as Count Baldor and the Dare.

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“Announcing this tape marks a huge milestone for me as an artist,” PinkPantheress wrote in a press release last year. “This feels like the most tied together project I’ve applied myself to as an artist and for my fans who have been with me for years, I hope they can hear the signs of growth in me.”

That seemed apparent at Outside Lands as mist drizzled over the cypress trees surrounding the stage and the faces of dedicated festivalgoers. The artist admitted to the crowd that she thought the San Francisco weather was going to be warmer, but it provided a fitting atmosphere for the more melancholic tracks from her earlier mixtapes, 2021’s “To Hell with It” and 2023’s “Heaven Knows.” She casually kneels on the stage as though spilling secrets at a sleepover.

But it wasn’t long until the energy picked back up again, a girlish “yeah!” ricocheting against the beat. She performs a cheeky nod to the Zendaya-starring tennis romance “Challengers” with her backup dancers during a remix of Troye Sivan’s 2023 hit “Rush.” As she sings about crying at a party in “Break It off,” a dance circle opens up in the group of friends to my right, one enthusiastic fan voguing in the middle.

PinkPantheress opts to wrap up her set with true crowdpleasers: “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2,” her first chart-topping hit featuring rapper Ice Spice, and finally “Illegal,” a song with over 269 million streams on Spotify that’s also been featured in over 1.2 million videos on TikTok to date. Set to the hypnotic pulsing sequencer from Underworld’s “Dark & Long,” the infamous opening line — “My name is Pink and I’m really glad to meet you” — seemed to emanate from the lips of every fan in the audience. It’s a song that sounds like it could be about a meeting between illicit lovers, but is revealed to be about buying weed for the first time and getting too high. The crowd eats it up, jumping along with the rhythm and waving their arms.     

“Apparently I’m in the mosh pit now,” I overhear the mom from earlier say, who is now surrounded by her daughter’s friends and seems to be warming up to it all.

PinkPantheress disappears into the flashing lights and her dancers collapse, out of breath.