Still Sincere lands twenty-eight years after MJ Cole built the original Sincere in his parents’ bedroom.
That gap shows. Not in conflict, but in what each artist needs the track to do now.
When Cole released Sincere in 1998, UK garage was still proving itself. The Rhodes keyboards, the minor ninths, the jazzier feel: Cole was making the genre grow up without asking permission.
He pieced together vocals from a sample CD using an Atari ST and Akai MPC3000XL. PinkPantheress’ Still Sincere rewrites that history without erasing it.
PinkPantheress arrives at the collaboration already fluent in garage’s vocabulary.
She has spent years sampling and recontextualizing the sound, making it work for a generation that experiences nostalgia secondhand.
She ditches Cole’s original vocals entirely. What remains is the architecture: those skippy beats, that soulful warmth.
Her take doesn’t sound reverent. It sounds casual, which might be more honest.
She has called Cole “a garage legend” whose work “inspired bits of my early work,” but the track refuses to cosplay as tribute.
The collaboration works because neither artist performs gratitude. Cole gets a new reading of his most famous work. PinkPantheress gets validation from someone who was there.
The release comes packaged with a remastered version of the 1998 original.
Cole’s Sincere remains a perfectly intact time capsule. PinkPantheress’ Still Sincere proves the song can survive being pulled into the present.
What neither version addresses is whether garage needs rescuing at all. The genre never stopped moving.
It just stopped asking for permission to exist outside its original context.
PinkPantheress learned from Cole’s blueprint, then filed off the serial numbers.
The collaboration acknowledges they were never as far apart as the calendar suggests.
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