Making an unforgettable entrance with her boundary pushing artistry, welcome 潘PAN (real name Pan Wei Ju), one of the most groundbreaking musicians you’re likely to hear this year.

Though Pan Wei Ju is an entirely new artist – new outlook, new message, new material and name – you may have met the woman herself before. Back in the mid-’10s, the Taipei-born rapper went by the moniker Aristophanes. After performing a career-changing feature on ‘SCREAM’, taken from Grimes’ celebrated NME Album of 2015 ‘Art Angels’, Aristophanes went on to build a cult fanbase, releasing her debut mixtape ‘Humans Become Machines’ two years later and then… silence. The release disappeared from Spotify, while confused fans started entire Reddit threads dedicated to discussing where the musician might have gone.

The answer, however, comes now in the form of ‘Reborn’: Pan’s first new material since that time and the first to be released under her own name. There’s no grand story to the Spotify wobble – her old distributor went bust during Covid; it’s now back on the platform, re-released by new label Transgressive Records. But as for the musician herself, Pan is reemerging with the same new energy that the EP’s title might suggest. “Aristophanes was me writing in my bedroom and doing my own thing, whereas now after years of travelling around, what I want to do is more about connection,” she says. “As an artist I’m more mature. This new music is bigger and it has a stronger message.”

Working with Grimes – a fellow self-taught female artist who produces and engineers everything herself – was the confidence booster that Pan needed. “If you’ve got ears and you’ve got a desire to express, then you can learn all the things from Youtube – it’s not just limited to men,” she says. “I can learn that and I can do what I want, I just need to do the work.” And so, for the past half decade, Pan has been doing exactly that.

Across a constantly morphing sound palette that moves from metallic, apocalyptic beats to delicate nods to the traditional music of her Asian heritage, via heavy, industrial moments, spacious soundscapes and much more, the thread is Pan’s utterly mesmeric vocal. Performing in a mix of Mandarin and English, she explains that having the two languages to play with is “like featuring another artist who has a different way of describing things”.

Across the releases, confident sexual expression mixes with tenderness, empathy and a particularly feminine sort of strength to create a world that Pan hopes will transcend language and connect her audience via something more innate. “The music is a place to feel safe,” she says. “The message that I want to carry through the two EPs and the album is to demonstrate the strength of accepting your own situations. When you can’t make things right but you’ve done your best, sometimes it’s really hard to admit that to yourself. It takes strength to do that. I use lots of sexual metaphors, but I feel like it’s more about the female need to be seen and heard. I want to build something more delicate and layered and connected to our life experience – to the trauma and the pleasure and the growth.”

In the time since she last stepped into the spotlight, the musician has experienced her fair share of all these things. Now, it’s as an entirely evolved artist that she returns with a new collection of music that revels in it all: the trauma, the pleasure, the growth and the long-awaited rebirth of Pan Wei Ju.