There’s a war brewing in pop music — and Tinashe is on the front lines.
As the 2020s barrel through its second half, two major archetypes of female pop stardom have come to dominate the scene. On one side, there are confessional songwriting, guitar-toting singer-songwriters who, in several ways, seem perpetually frozen in high school; on the other, we have sleazy, debaucherous party girls who revel in sex and drugs in quest of liberation and, ultimately, understanding.
As it stands, both factions are startlingly white, leaving little room in the mainstream for Black female pop stars who make Black music foundational elements of their music as opposed to simply mining it for muted samples. From Al Sharpton notoriously deeming Whitney Houston as “Whitey Houston” ahead of her being booed at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards to the recent social media discourse surrounding Ravyn Lenae’s claiming of the “pop” label for her new Blue Island era, the debate over who can claim — let alone be widely perceived as — a “popstar” has been raging for decades. Eight albums in, Tinashe is addressing the conversation head-on.
Popstar, the official follow-up to 2024’s Quantum Baby, arrived on Sept. 25 via Nice Life, Atlantic and Tinashe Music, marking the latest entry in a catalog that has not-so-quietly shaped global pop music for the last 10 years. Her 2016 “Superlove” music video became a touchstone for late-2010s K-Pop visuals, and the artwork for 2019’s Songs for You established a new go-to aesthetic for early-2020s pop releases. During the Quantum Baby era, Tinashe transformed that oft-underrated impact into a pair of hits that brought her back to the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in a decade. “Nasty” rode a viral dance trend to a No. 61 peak, and “No Broke Boys” soared to No. 36 on the back of a Disco Lines remix that dominated EDM clubs and festivals last summer.
“There’s a lot of attention, there’s a lot of discussion,” she told Rolling Stone in a profile ahead of POPSTAR’s release. “People are ready for it, which is a new feeling.”
There are probably more eyeballs on Tinashe pre-album release than ever before, which is precisely why she delivered a blazingly confrontational project that contends with stunted understandings of what pop music can sound, look and feel like. The artwork — which zooms in on a literally starry-eyed Tinashe gazing into the distance with headphones on — has drawn ire from fans for its decidedly unglamorous approach to pop music imagery. But that’s the point. The headphones call back to Tinashe’s dazzling production skills, the stars in her eyes represent the dizzying allure of pop stardom, and her facial expression sits somewhere between awe, bewilderment, determination, and wonder. It’s the portrait of a pop star who’s been grinding for years to dismantle and redefine pop stardom in her own image.
Musically, the 16-track set mirrors the artwork’s nuanced approach to pop stardom by surveying a jaw-dropping collection of sounds, including hyperpop, R&B, dance, jazz, new age, bedroom pop, and even a little hint of country. In a testament to her sequencing skills, the album seamlessly shifts through this variety of sounds across 40 minutes (a longer runtime than her last two projects combined), but it’s the disarming lyricism on cuts like the introspective “Empty Stadium” or the emotion-purging “Heavy Weight” that help anchor the record’s loftier ambitions. Yes, a pop star can pull from Janet Jackson and Britney Spears as liberally as she pulls from Santigold, Ciara and Dawn Richard; if she’s turning the personal into the universal through undeniably earworm hooks, then why not?
Popstar is sneakily sarcastic and gloriously sassy, but Tinashe, unlike quite a few of her contemporaries, can actually commit — and back it up.
Here’s how Billboard ranks every track on POPSTAR, Tinashe’s eighth studio album, from worst to best.
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