Tinashe is still one week away from the release of her eighth studio album, Popstar, and she can feel the pressure building. In the past, her records have arrived not exactly quietly, but often under the radar. Something different is happening with this one. “There’s a lot of attention, there’s a lot of discussion,” she tells Rolling Stone. “People are ready for it, which is a new feeling.”
Tinashe is in New York to kick off Coach and Spotify’s Tabby Tour event series with a performance for a yard full of fans who flocked to lower Manhattan with just a few hours notice. There’s talk amongst the crowd about the album, but nothing as loud or abrasive as the chatter happening online about everything from her album cover to her single choices to her strong, vocal opinions about her album cover and single choices. Popstar was always meant to open up a bigger conversation. It’s just getting started a little early.
“I wanted to create a record that felt very confident and bold in its title, in its taking up space, in its arrival, like announcing that I’m here,” Tinashe says. “Calling the album Popstar, I felt like really claiming a spot for myself. I think that that level of confidence has also created more conversation, perhaps a little more pressure around the whole thing.”
This past week, Tinashe has made her stance clear online with fans and spectators who have decided they aren’t sold on Popstar. There’s been lots of talk about the album cover, which zooms in close on her face to show a ring of stars in her eyes and she stares forward in a trancelike state. Her headphones are on in the picture, fitting for an album made for an intentional rather than passive listening experience. Someone on X told her she should have chosen one of the promotional images instead, particularly one capturing her sitting on the edge of a building with a view of the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles in the back. “Not every creative choice is as simple as ‘oh this picture is pretty,’” she replied.
“As a consumerist society, that’s really easy to be like, ‘This looks the best, this the flashiest, this could get your attention, this is the hit song, this is the soundbite, this is the TikTok clip that’s gonna go viral,’” Tinashe says now. “To be a true artist, you have to be able to transcend that and push against that because once we are focused on that, it just narrows the creative process. We’re so much more layered than a thumbnail or a soundbite.” The cover she chose for the album was selected with the intention of creating conversation. It’s alluring to the eye, and almost unsettling if you look into her eyes for too long. “The cover is not what you would expect in terms of the flashiest, most pop-star-esque visual,” she says. “That is, to me, the key, because it makes me think there’s more to the story.”
Tinashe has previewed Popstar with five singles already. “Pillow Fight” couldn’t be more distinct from “Crash Out,” which exists on an entirely separate spectrum than “Melatonin,” which shows a different dimension than “Too Easy” and “I’d Rather Be Alone.” “Crash Out” is a highlight among the batch, a percussive-heavy track about trying to maintain focus through a storm of questioning voices. There are 11 more songs waiting on the other side of the album release that will expand on the themes presented in the singles. Tinashe is confident enough in the record to not care too much when someone on X tells her, “Step ya game up or I’m not tuning in” because they only like one song so far. “By all means,” she replied. “Please do not tune in.”
“It does feel like we’re in an era where people are a bit more averse to nuance and aren’t taking the time to really dig into why choices are made creatively,” Tinashe says. “It’s really important for artists to stick to their guns in that sense and not just put out things that are very easily palatable.” She doesn’t come across as overly defensive in her replies, maybe just a little annoyed at the lack of effort on these fans’ part to engage thoughtfully with the material, all while making the demands of a major-label executive from behind a screen. She’s not taking feedback from them, either.
Tinashe has been operating independently since 2019, when she split from RCA Records. At the time, her manager described the departure as “giving her back creative control” after five years and three albums. There were times during that earlier point in her career where she was pushed to record music she didn’t feel connected to, and others where creative differences delayed release timelines for months. She can’t be faulted, then, for not wanting to take artistic advice from Stan Twitter. There are important conversations happening in these online spaces about which artists are shaping the pop landscape, or making decisions that stand out from the onslaught of releases. But fans also have a habit of flattening the dimensions of what they’re consuming. Simply put, Tinashe says, “Nuance is dead.”
“The conversation to me is bigger than just the fans, it’s bigger than the artist. It’s really the system that we’ve set up and how artists are allowed to thrive,” she says. “We make it very black and white, and we reduce it to something that can be so much more reductive than what an artist typically has to say in all the layers of something.” We’ve seen how pop discourse can draw meaningful parallels to bigger developments in culture, enough to know there’s value to those conversations — but only if they aren’t contained to the limited space of an online timeline. “I don’t have the answer to how to fix this problem,” Tinashe says. “But I think it’s just continuing to be authentic and not feel like you have to limit yourself, or overly censor yourself in certain ways to fit in or appeal to a certain demographic.”
It’s a rule of thumb that has worked for her peers whose breakout moments coincided with her own in the 2010s, like Charli XCX and Zara Larsson. “There’s a lot of us girls who have been working and grinding for 10-plus years in the game,” Tinashe says. “I can only speak for myself, but how I’ve felt is that I’ve been perhaps underrated. [We’ve] constantly just been working with our heads down, grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding. You get to a point where you kind of have this breakout moment. It’s so exciting to see. I’m so proud and happy for all my peers and the girls who have been doing it for a decade as well who are getting their moment.”
In August, Charli posted on X, “Tinashe melodies go hardddd.” A few weeks later, PinkPantheress raved about “Crash Out” in another post. “Song of the year,” she said. “I’m so sorry but she’s taking it.” None of these artists have ever quite approached pop in a predictable or straightforward way. Instead, they’ve shifted the collective understanding of what the genre looks and sounds like in the 2020s. “People have a very narrow understanding of what pop means nowadays, and it’s very clean, it’s very mainstream, it’s very white, and it’s very contrived,” Tinashe says. “It’s nice to question that. There are so many people outside of that binary that do what I would consider pop, and so I’d like to bring those people into the conversation.”
As the countdown to Popstar continues, Tinashe is welcoming the pressure as long as it gets people not only talking, but thinking. It’s nothing she can’t handle.
