Walker started writing music in high school to help a friend before eventually writing music on her own.  At age 17, she began using GarageBand to produce instrumentals for her friend, fellow singer Mazz, and she later used GarageBand to record many of her early songs while lying down in her university hall late at night. She started uploading original songs of hers to SoundCloud as PinkPantheress, where they received little attention. After a video posted to her personal TikTok account in December 2020 received over 500,000 likes, she posted a snippet of her song "Just a Waste" as PinkPantheress later that month in the hopes of reaching a wider audience; the snippet soon went viral on the platform.

Victoria Beverley Walker was born on 18 April 2001 in Bath, Somerset, to a Kenyan Luo mother from Kisumu, who works as a carer, and an English father, who works as a statistics professor. She has one older brother, who works as an audio engineer. When she was five years old, her family moved from Bath to Canterbury, Kent, where she grew up. Her father moved to the United States to work at a university in Austin, Texas, when she was 12 years old, while she and her mother stayed in England.

Walker took piano lessons as a child, and, at age 12, sang "Stand by Me" by Ben E. King at a school talent show. When she was 14 years old, she became the lead singer in a rock band, which covered songs by My Chemical Romance, Paramore, and Green Day, and performed with them for the first time at a school fête.

She studied film at the University of the Arts London until 2022, when she dropped out.

Victoria Beverley Walker (born 18 April 2001), known professionally as PinkPantheress, is an English singer-songwriter and producer. Her songs, which are frequently short in length and include samples of music from the 1990s and 2000s, span a number of genres, including alt-pop, bedroom pop, drum and bass, and 2-step garage. She has been nominated for three Brit Awards, and was named Producer of the Year by Billboard Women in Music in 2024.