PinkPantheress Easily Conquers ‘Hot Ones’ Wings of Death Gauntlet While Confessing She Didn’t Think Her Career Would Last 5 Years
Categoria: Musica
Host Sean Evans sweetly reminded the "Boy's a Liar" singer not to touch her eyes during the sauce challenge.
Por Billboard | 11/06/2026
For someone who protested too much at the top about how she’s not a fan of overly spicy food, PinkPantheress easily worked her way up the Scoville scale on her Hot Ones appearance this week. In fact, she was so chill she had time to praise host Sean Evans for his thoughtful, deeply researched questions and ask him about his taste in British music while hardly breaking a sweat. Halfway through her heat challenge, the 25-year-old Canterbury, U.K. native did admit, however, that when she started her career seven years ago she never imagined she’d still be burning up the charts today. “When I first started, I remember being told, ‘your career isn’t gonna be a one or two year, it should be a 10-year career.’ And I was like, ‘oh really?,'” she recalled thinking. “I didn’t expect to make it even five years by the way. I didn’t, but we’re still here. And I’m on Hot Ones .” The “Boy’s a Liar” singer boasted that her half-Kenyan heritage makes her “not unfamiliar with spice,” while fessing up that when she visits the popular South African chicken restaurant chain Nando’s she goes for the mildest Peri Tamer sauce, even as she stared down the formidable row of progressively scorching sauces in front of her. Though she’s been open about struggling with stage fright in the past, the singer said she’s gotten much more confident and in the groove on stage over the past year or so, mostly because she realized she has to be the one in charge of the energy flow. “When I used to perform on stage I would act as if the audience were in charge. So I would let them dictate how I perform,” she explained. “So if they weren’t enjoying it, I’d be like, ‘oh they’re not enjoying it, I’m not going to go out there.’ But then as time went on, I think somebody once basically drilled into my head that I have to be the person that dictates them, not the other way around,” she added. “And so even when you are on stage and you’re like everybody jump, like they jump. So it’s like you literally can just like you just need to own it.” After gamely building her ultimate imaginary “perfect singer songwriter” — Lily Allen’s, melodies, Frou Frou’s beats and Chief Keef’s rule-breaking — Pantheress said she doesn’t think a songwriter has to have experienced everything they sing about, though pilfering other people’s stories is a no-go. “That being said, I don’t think you should appropriate any stories that … I don’t think we need to sing about everything,” she said, citing SZA’s “Kill Bill” as an example. “Obviously she [SZA] didn’t kill her — I just think I love storytelling in such an abstract way. I have a song about drowning in a bathtub,” she noted about her 2023 Heaven Knows track “Ophelia.” That prompted host Evans to wonder i