“Tonight” is PinkPantheress at her most dialed in: two minutes of breathy chaos, boy problems, and glitter-streaked vulnerability passed through a UK garage filter.

It’s easy to talk about PinkPantheress as a TikTok phenomenon first and a musician second. That framing has been beaten to death, and it usually misses what’s actually interesting about her. She doesn’t operate like a pop star looking for a viral hook as she’s more like a diarist who lets her voice fall into whatever beat makes sense that week. Since her meteoric rise in 2021, she has proven adept at distilling complex feelings into bite-sized moments of musical catharsis. Her debut mixtape, To Hell With It, was a revelation, a scrapbook of garage beats and wistful melodies that captured the zeitgeist. Now, after a brief hiatus following her 2023 album Heaven Knows, she prefaces a new mixtape, Fancy That, and her reentry into the musical fray with “Tonight”.

The song clocks in under two and a half minutes, like most of her work, but it’s doing a lot in that window. Sampling Panic! at the Disco’s “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” from their 2008 album Pretty. Odd., the track, like much of what PinkPantheress does, is dipped in nostalgia. The sample is a nod to emo-pop’s golden era and a recontextualization that turns Brendon Urie’s wistful musings into the backdrop for PinkPantheress’s exploration of longing and anticipation. “You want sex with me? Come talk to me,” she repeats, half-seductive, half-daring.