PinkPantheress Is Running Pop From Behind the Desk

A BRIT for production, a Tinashe flip, a girl group’s debut EP and a TIME100 Next nod: in 2026, some of the most revealing PinkPantheress records are not hers.

On the night of September 27, PinkPantheress collected her first MTV Video Music Award, an art direction prize for the “Stateside + Zara Larsson” video, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. By the time the ceremony wound down, a different kind of credit had gone live: a flip of Tinashe’s “Twentyfive Eight,” co-produced by PinkPantheress and Count Baldor, sitting on an iTunes-only bonus edition of Tinashe’s new album. The trophy was for a music video. The remix was the more revealing move.

Didn’t know I needed this collab until now 🤞🤞@pinkpantheress2 @charli_xcx #VMAs https://t.co/OmmNE8c3Sa

— MTV (@MTV) September 28, 2026

Signal. What happened: across a single week, PinkPantheress released a co-produced remix of a Tinashe album track, won her first VMA, was named to TIME’s 2026 TIME100 Next list with a tribute written by Kelela, and was revealed as executive producer of British girl group Say Now’s debut EP. Exact object: “Twentyfive Eight (PinkPantheress & Count Baldor Flip)” on Tinashe’s Popstar (Bonus Edition), plus Say Now’s forthcoming debut EP, previewed by the single “Met my match.” When and where: the flip went up on iTunes on September 27 to 28, 2026; the TIME100 Next list followed on September 30; the Say Now EP is due in November 2026. Source: TIME’s own tribute page, the BRIT Awards’ announcement and contemporaneous music press. Why it matters: it is the clearest evidence yet that her production work, not only her own singles, is now steering her career, and that other artists are actively seeking her ear.e.

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Tinashe released Popstar, her eighth studio album, on September 25 through Atlantic, Tinashe Music and Nice Life. Two days later she added a bonus edition, available only on iTunes, carrying four reworkings: Nick León on “Brainrot,” umru on the title track, an extended “Too Easy,” and the PinkPantheress and Count Baldor version of “Twentyfive Eight,” the album’s eleventh track. Popstar had been trailed since June by the single “Too Easy,” whose bass-heavy rush sits closer to the PinkPantheress sound than most of the record. The original is one of the record’s cooler, more restrained moments. The flip piles heavy low end underneath it and raises the pulse without flattening the song’s mood, so it reads as a PinkPantheress record while still sounding like Tinashe.

The pairing has been brewing for a while. PinkPantheress had named Tinashe in 2025 as an artist she wanted to produce for, and this remix is the first concrete result. When it went live she posted a short note on X crediting the production to herself and Count Baldor and sending Tinashe her love. Tinashe, for her part, skipped the VMAs to play the All Things Go festival in Washington, D.C., so the remix effectively arrived as the night’s quiet second headline.

Count Baldor deserves more than a footnote. He co-wrote and co-produced “Tonight,” the lead single from 2025’s Fancy That, and contributed additional production to several songs on her 2023 debut album, Heaven Knows, including the Kelela duet “Bury Me.” He also appears in the credits of Say Now’s new single, which is where the production story gets bigger.

MY GIRLS UGHH YOU BETTER TUNE IN
Co-produced and co-written by yours truly 🤩

— pinkpantheress (@pinkpantheress2) September 18, 2026

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The group has been working toward this for some time. Rolling Stone dates its formation to 2022, under the placeholder name Needanamebro, and the trio has been releasing music since 2023. “Met my match” is quick and flirtatious, built on bright synths, handclaps and layered Y2K-leaning vocals. It sounds like a PinkPantheress production without sounding like a PinkPantheress song, which is a harder trick than it looks, and it gives the group a sharper identity than anything it had released before.

Oscar Scheller’s presence is significant too. He co-wrote “Mosquito” and “The Aisle” on Heaven Knows, is among the producers credited on Fancy That, and produced much of Kelela’s new album. Between Scheller and Count Baldor, the Say Now project draws on the same small circle that built PinkPantheress’s own catalog, now pointed at someone else’s voices.

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The Kelela connection runs three years deep. Kelela featured on “Bury Me” in 2023, the two performed it together in Brooklyn in 2024, and in July 2026 PinkPantheress returned the favor on “the bridge,” the final single from Kelela’s third studio album, new avatar, released July 10 on Warp Records. Kelela, PinkPantheress and Scheller wrote the song together, and the two singers trade lines over a muted, propulsive dance beat that leaves room for both voices to shift between registers, sometimes stern and sometimes silky within the same short verse. The album itself draws on Kelela’s roots in Washington, D.C.’s independent music scene, features A.K. Paul and Fousheé, and is being toured this autumn, with a London date at O2 Academy Brixton on November 4.

PinkPantheress has credited Kelela, alongside Kaytranada, as a formative influence on her move into electronic music, and has said that discovering Kelela’s song “Waitin” in 2018 changed the way she heard music. So it carried weight when TIME named PinkPantheress to its 2026 TIME100 Next list on September 30 and gave the tribute to Kelela. In her tribute for TIME, Kelela recalled being floored on first listen, said she understood why fans online kept linking the two of them, and insisted the younger artist is “not an extension of anybody.”

The rest of the tribute is about authorship. Kelela stressed that PinkPantheress writes her own songs and produces much of her own music, and that she is doing it as a Black femme artist in a genre that has rarely made room for that, so every track she releases keeps a door open for whoever follows.

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The award that made the producer argument official arrived in February. On February 23, the BRIT Awards announced PinkPantheress as Producer of the Year ahead of the February 28 ceremony at Manchester’s Co-op Live. She was 24, the youngest recipient in the category’s history, edging out Steve Levine, who was 25 when he won in 1984, and the first woman to receive it since the prize was first presented in 1977. The previous year’s winner was A. G. Cook. On the night she was also nominated for Artist of the Year and Dance Act.

In her statement she called production the part of her work she is proudest of, and said she hoped the win would push others toward their own passions. The BRITs honor followed her Producer of the Year recognition at Billboard’s Women in Music awards in 2024, and two nominations at the 2026 Grammys, for Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Pop Recording.

Her toolkit is famously spare. In a series of videos shared in March, she revealed that most of her production happens on nothing more elaborate than a MacBook keyboard. It is a detail that says more about ear than equipment, and it helps explain why her fingerprints travel so easily onto other artists’ songs.

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Some of the year’s endorsements came from deeper in her own listening history. Earlier in 2026, Imogen Heap called into YouTuber Derrick Gee’s music series Solid Air and asked PinkPantheress for production tips, as Rolling Stone recounted, then covered “True Romance” from Heaven Knows, leaving her visibly overwhelmed. It is a neat reversal. Heap, an influence PinkPantheress has long cited, became in 2010 the first woman to win the Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, for her album Ellipse.

Other appearances are quieter. On “Crush,” the opening track of Jae Stephens’ debut album AUDACITY, released September 25 through Def Jam and RAEDIO, PinkPantheress sings backing vocals on the refrain. Stephens joked online that her own attempt at an English accent on the demo had been beyond saving, which is why the real thing was called in.

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The live side of her year was just as crowded. At Coachella in April, PinkPantheress played the Mojave stage on both weekends. The first set, on April 11, turned the tent into a warehouse party, with a DJ set from the Dare, appearances from HorsegiirL and Thundercat, pianist Precious Renee Tucker, and actor Tyriq Withers stepping in as the title character of “Romeo.” The second, on April 18, brought out Janelle Monáe for “Another Life,” along with Zara Larsson and Blood Orange.

That instinct for filling a room with collaborators was already on record. Last October she turned her 2025 mixtape Fancy That into Fancy Some More?, a remix companion released through Warner Records with more than twenty guests, ranging from Kylie Minogue, Basement Jaxx and Sugababes to Kaytranada, Nia Archives, Oklou, Bladee, SEVENTEEN and Anitta. Its “Stateside” remix with Zara Larsson reached the top ten in the United States, and in February it soundtracked Olympic champion Alysa Liu’s closing gala skate at the Winter Games in Milan. By the time this year’s VMAs came around, the song’s video was up for five awards.

Fancy That itself, released in May 2025, set the template. A roughly twenty-minute mixtape, it drew openly on classic British dance music, with PinkPantheress citing Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada and Fatboy Slim as touchstones, and it was made with a tight crew that included Aksel Arvid, the Dare, Count Baldor and Oscar Scheller. The project has kept generating new life well into 2026: a Japan edition arrived in February, a Four Tet remix of “Illegal” followed in the spring, and in May the “Girl Like Me” video cast the British broadcaster Davina McCall.

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PinkPantheress turned 25 in April. In five years she has gone from short TikTok snippets made in a university dorm to a BBC Sound of 2022 win, a Mercury Prize shortlisting for Fancy That, an honorary doctorate in music from the University of Kent, and a world tour, An Evening With… PinkPantheress, that ran from September 2025 to a final date in Berlin on June 2, 2026. The headline credits are easy to list. The more telling line on her résumé is the one growing in other people’s liner notes: a Tinashe flip, a Kelela duet, a Jae Stephens harmony and, in November, a full Say Now EP with her name at the top as executive producer.