Pain

“Pain” is the opening track to English singer-songwriter-record producer PinkPantheress and her debut mixtape “to hell with it“.

“Pain” was one of PinkPantheress’ first tracks to go viral on TikTok, which led her to sign with Parlophone and Elektra Records. “Pain” samples the iconic 2000 single “Flowers” from UK garage duo Sweet Female Attitude, but more specifically the karaoke version. In the YouTube description of the audio upload of the track, PinkPantheress also went on to state the original chord progression of the song: “is Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie no. 1”.

In the song, PinkPantheress reminisces her feelings for a past lover, whom she still holds a huge amount of love for, so much to the point that when she seems them or thinks about them, she feels pain. PinkPantheress spoke about the song going viral with Apple Music:

  “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day […]… ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up travelling a little bit […]  A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample [Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths and all those influences.” 

The audio video for the song was uploaded to PinkPantheress’ YouTube channel on the 30th January 2021, after request from her followers on music platform SoundCloud to release a full version. The song plays over an episode of iconic cartoon The Pink Panther. As of late February 2022, the video had a total of 5.1 million views with 183 thousand likes.

Read the lyrics to “Pain” here.

*All information accurate at time of publishing.