PinkPantheress On Stepping Away From Music To Deal With Mental Health

In an interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe this week, PinkPantheress was fully transparent about leaving music for a few months and canceling her own Capable of Love tour and appearances including multiple tour dates with artists Olivia Rodrigo and Coldplay.

The “Pain” singer released a statement on her Instagram story back in 2024, reported by Variety at the time, where she wrote to her fans, “It is with the heaviest heart that sadly have to announce that i will not be able to continue with the rest of my live shows this year in order to focus on my physical health and overall wellbeing. It appears i have reached a wall which i am struggling to penetrate through."

However, despite her struggles, during her break she described she took some time for her personal life and leisure time.

“I think at the time I was seeing someone ... I was doing a bit of traveling ... I’m a homebody so I was also just at home. I was just kind of revisiting my friends, seeing friends I haven’t seen for a long time and ... stuff like that.”

When asked if she hesitated to leave music after finding some success, the artist said she did take that into consideration.

“100%. But not even just because things are rolling, but more because of financial reasons why,” she explained. “If you agree to do shows and you don’t follow through, there’s a lot of money being missed out on. There’s also a lot of-- the opportunity for backlash ... the least of my concerns was the money, obviously.”

Although she might have received some comments for stepping out of the spotlight, the singer knew taking a break was the right thing to do at the time.

“I’m just somebody genuinely speaking that is used to not looking after thineself because I push through and that’s honestly one of the reason's I lost my hearing in this ear because of that.”

“So after that happened, I don’t know what it was. I think it was when I started cutting my hair with razor blades when I realized, you know what I’m actually going to stop now ... I think it was when I cut my hair off where I was like, ‘you know what, I’m going to probably take a step back and chill.”

She explained it was getting to a point where her mental health struggles started to become more real.

“I don’t really suffer with any kind of lapse in judgment when it comes to myself usually, but that’s when I knew ... it was crazy, like, I had an impulse to literally, like, get follicles of hair off of me so I needed to.”

But she knew it wasn't really about the hair. “There was something that I needed to address, so I had to leave and I did that for my own good. And obviously it was a very sad moment for people that wanted to see me but couldn’t see me. But obviously, what goes around comes around, and I’ll be back again.”

PinkPantheress revealed she knew she wanted to come back to music because she knew she wanted to release something new this year.

“For me, it was like around August time where I was like, okay, let’s get going again,” she said. “Actually, it was funny, I’m somebody that really also rushes a lot of things so, funnily enough, I was making it in August and it was finished in November and I was telling my label like, ‘Let me release it.’’’

She described how her record label wasn’t on the same page with her and told her to release it at a more strategic time.

“They were like, ‘why would you release it so soon, why don’t you give yourself a proper roll out.’ I’ve never really done a proper roll out before," she explained.

Following her break, she released the song “Tonight," and dropped a new song and music video, “Stateside,” this week.

Her new mixtape, Fancy That is set to release May 9th which is her first release since her 2023 debut album, Heaven Knows. She will also be having shows in Brixton, London in September.