PinkPantheress gave her first performance without vocal tuning on NPR Tiny Desk – check it out below.
Her set went live on Friday (September 5), although the musician admitted that she had considered backing out, as NPR didn’t allow her to use autotune software.
“This is my first performance I’ve done with no tuning,” she told the crowd. “I’ve never sang with no tuning before so this is really scary. I nearly didn’t do this because the NPR people were like, ‘You can’t use anything.’ Then I was like, ‘Let me try to figure it out and see how it goes.’”
The performance saw her play stripped-down versions of some of her earliest songs, including ‘Attracted to You’, where she also played the harmonica, and ‘Pain’.
She also reimagined her viral hit ‘Illegal’ into a jazz-inflected version, and played ‘The Aisle’, ‘Passion’ and ‘Tonight’, which included an interpolation of the chorus from ‘Boys a Liar’. Check it out below.
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Pink’s latest album ‘Fancy That’ was listed on NME’s list of the best albums of 2025 so far, and the description for the LP read: “No longer content with being the elusive girl behind the screen, Pinkpantheress proves she can shapeshift, push boundaries and still keep us hooked”.
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In other news, earlier this year, the University of Kent awarded her with an honorary doctorate in music.
It echoed comments she made to NME in 2023, where she said she was glad to be representing her own unique blend of alt-pop and drum’n’bass as a Black woman. “It’s another example of Black people managing to spearhead a whole genre of music, and I’m really glad I’m the one doing that,” she told us.
