So far, all things considered, 2024 has been pretty dark. Online, people are responding by embracing fecklessness and hedonism. Some are having a Brat summer, inspired by Charli xcx’s frank, debauched new album; others are choosing to get “nasty”, tapping into a straightforwardly horny call-to-arms from the American singer Tinashe on her single of the same name: “Is somebody gonna match my freak?”
“Freak” in this context means a wild and unusual sexual proclivity, and the phrase has become a meme, motto, or dating-profile tagline for anyone looking to let off steam over the past few months. Tinashe understands the impulse. “It’s not a super happy, exciting time to be living in the world,” the 31-year-old says on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “That creates a pendulum that swings towards people just wanting to listen to music that makes them find release and joy.”
The pendulum couldn’t have swung back toward Tinashe at a better time. The Kentucky-born pop singer found early commercial success with the 2014 track 2 On – a deceptively sensual ode to getting off your face – and her debut album Aquarius. Then things began to go off the rails: her album Joyride was heavily delayed until 2018; struggles between Tinashe and her then-label, Sony subsidiary RCA Records, started to become apparent. In 2019, they parted ways and Tinashe started releasing music as an independent artist, and choosing leftfield collaborators that most pop stars wouldn’t dream of: Machinedrum, Kito, Vladislav Delay. But by that point, the singer was already being considered a has-been by the industry gatekeepers who once hailed her as a new force in pop.
Nasty, which arrived 10 years after the release of 2 On, puts a blingy capstone on Tinashe’s recent career, after bucking the major label system and, somewhat improbably, emerging more successful than before: it’s her first Billboard Hot 100 entry in the US as a lead artist since 2 On. But Nasty’s impact has been felt even more deeply, with countless memes about couples who “matched each other’s freak”, everyone from Omar Apollo to Christina Aguilera making a video set to the song, and Tinashe’s idol Janet Jackson mashing the track up with her own Nasty on stage.
The song was a product of serendipity – a lot of the lyrics “came off the dome” as Tinashe mumbled over a beat by Lizzo collaborator Ricky Reed – but it also speaks to her enduring love for Jackson. “I had just gotten a necklace made that said ‘nasty’, because my nickname is Nasty ‘Nashe, because of Janet, who is ‘Miss Jackson if you’re nasty’,” she says, delivering the iconic line with relish. “She’s just the blueprint – it’s not that it was a super conscious decision, but it all traces back to her.”
Between Tinashe and her onetime collaborator Charli xcx – who also found mainstream success a decade ago, before retreating and re-emerging on to the charts this year – it’s a good time to be an idiosyncratic player of the long game. “I hope it’s inspiring,” Tinashe says. “It’s a big lesson for younger artists or artists who are having a popping moment right now, who still have a long journey ahead of them. It’s just like: don’t stop. Just keep going. You might get your moment, or you might not, but at the end of the day, you just keep making shit, and it’s dope, and that’s great.”
At this point, Tinashe is a veteran. She began her career as a child actor before joining a girl group named the Stunners when she was 14. In their scant four-year career, they signed to Columbia Records and toured with Justin Bieber. When they disbanded in 2011, Tinashe immediately began work on solo music, and began releasing mixtapes on SoundCloud before she had turned 17. Her drive has always been evident, but drive is rarely enough to insulate a female star against misogyny. Last year, after Tinashe said RCA pushed her to collaborate with Chris Brown and R Kelly in the early days of her career, Brown hit back, saying that “not one of us could save her career”.
Her fanbase instead helped to maintain her profile during the independent years that yielded 2019’s Songs For You album and 2021’s 333 (she is now signed to Nice Life, a label that’s linked to Atlantic Records, itself a subsidiary of Warner). But fans have also pushed a narrative that Tinashe is pop music’s perpetual victim, subject to the whims of the industry without any agency in her own career, a perspective she doesn’t subscribe to: “Identifying as someone who’s underrated isn’t a very healthy mindset, and I don’t like to feel like a victim.”
Online, fans tend to zero in on career milestones such as chart positions and streaming stats – exactly the kind of metrics she has decided to ignore. “A lot of people need validation that something is popular in order to like it, because a lot of people are just followers,” she says. “Some people don’t resonate with the idea of being able to just make something for the sake of making something.” As noted in one early Guardian profile, the background image on her phone used to be a photo of a Grammy – motivation to one day win music’s highest honour. She changed it a few years back, when she decided to stop “holding on to material or tangible markers of success,” she says. “I think it’s really toxic to have that mentality, especially long-term as a creative. It’s cool to have goals, but it’s more important to focus on legacy, and art.”
Despite trying to ignore much of the music industry, Tinashe still has a strong handle on its mechanics, and feels that it wouldn’t know what to do with her – a Black artist looking to make genreless pop, not just R&B or rap – if she debuted today. “There’s still a lot of segregation in the industry,” she says. “When it comes to playlists, award shows, who works on your music, how they promote you, it’s very black and white, literally.”
And Tinashe still feels she’s fighting an uphill battle when it comes to her own career – despite the huge success of Nasty. “In terms of being able to build to a huge place, a real mainstream-machine type role, that still is very much gate-kept,” she says, letting out a withering laugh. “It’s hard to achieve as somebody who isn’t playing in those systems.”
In the meantime, she’s about to release her seventh album, Quantum Baby – a sharp body of work that channels Nasty’s off-kilter approach to genre and style over eight sexy, hooky tracks. Largely created with another leftfield choice, LA beatmaker Nosaj Thing, it’s sleeker and more futuristic than last year’s BB/Ang31 (Baby Angel), which yielded the minor hit Needs – a conscious choice to avoid replicating past successes. “Chasing after something because it’s worked is a mistake,” she says. “I’ve done that in the past, and you can never duplicate a magical moment like that.” Plus, attention spans are so short now that you never know what a listener might want next. “They’ll be like, that album you worked on for two years, that was great – when’s the next one?” she says with another laugh. “Oh my God, it’s so sad.”
Even so, Nasty’s viral summer moment hasn’t changed what Tinashe wants to achieve: “I’ve let go of pressure to quote-unquote perform,” she says. She’s using the success of Nasty as “research, taking it into consideration”, and plans to “stay the course” with the creativity she’s established. Of course, she’ll allow herself a little indulgence. “Proving people wrong has always been motivation for me, whether it be people I went to high school with, or my former label, fans – people who are haters online,” she says. “That’s always a good feeling.”
• Quantum Baby is released 16 August on Nice Life Recording Company
