Everything’s Coming Up Tinashe

Tinashe arrives with breaking news. We’re sitting down for a pedicure on a balcony at the Four Seasons Hotel in L.A., sipping prosecco, when the conversation turns to aliens. Tinashe knows I'm in town from New York, so she asks, “Were you seeing those drones in New Jersey?" I had not. When she hears this, her eyes narrow and she pauses in disbelief and disappointment. Earlier that day, she had seen reports of "fucking huge car-sized drones" flying over the Garden State, but no one, including the FBI, knew what they were.

To be clear, she's elated. "When I was young, I was such an alien girl," the singer, born Tinashe Kachingwe, laughs. She decides on a pointe-shoe pink for her toes, an apt choice for a performer equally renowned for her dancing and singing. "I was checking out books about the Loch Ness Monster and aliens. I was huge on it, and I feel like I lost interest for some time because there was no new information." The reports of possible extraterrestrial activity only thrill her; a curiosity about the paranormal fully reactivated.

We both agree that aliens likely exist in a different dimension and would have an easier time coming to us than vice versa. But she's down to travel—a far-off galaxy, deep beneath the sea, wherever—to chop it up with the creatures, provided they give her a return ticket. I ask her which one of her songs she'd like to play for the aliens; something to give them a sense of her music, as well as an opportunity for all of them to vibe together. She immediately responds with "Getting No Sleep," last summer's dreamy, lo-fi track full of bleep-bloops that all beings of the universe can enjoy. It sounds like drifting around the galaxy in a pool float, solar winds flowing between your freshly painted toes.

It's fitting that our conversation takes us to outer space. The singer has been on a stratospheric rise of her own. Last summer, her monster hit "Nasty," a paean to symbiotic sexual energy, easily became the biggest hit of her decades-long music career. Her last single to chart was 2014's "2 On," a clubby, pop-R&B mix that brought everyone to the dance floor. That song's success seemed to prime her for a path as a prototypical single-genre singer: straightforward R&B from a pretty girl who poses for her album cover in oversized hoop earrings and her natural hair. But her style of music—a swirly hybrid of pop, R&B, and electronica, run through a hazy filter—has never been easily categorized. In the decade between her two Billboard appearances, Tinashe has ripped up the plans the industry had for her career and forged her own path forward: leaving her record label behind to go independent, and taking full creative control over her music, betting on herself—and her fans—to take her where she needs to be.

Which these days, seems to be everywhere. She's freshly back from Costa Rica, where she spent Thanksgiving being outdoorsy; ziplining, fishing, and tubing with her family. (Hence the need for a pedicure: She managed to rip both of her big toenails while on vacation. "I think I was in the ocean too much.”) Soon, her world tour will take her to Australia and Japan, with a quick Bali vacation in between.

We're meeting in December, and it's unimaginable to either of us on that blue-sky California day, that just a few weeks later wildfires would tear through her hometown as she watches from Australia. When we caught up again in January, she had just returned back to L.A. for the first time since the fires. She tells me that her family is safe, but like many, she knows countless people who have been affected. "There's just so much devastation," she says, still reeling.

A proud Los Angeles kid, Tinashe is a girl who loves her city down. Last spring, when she performed her first solo set at Coachella, she told me it was a teenage dream come true. "I've been going since I was 16, and growing up in that culture, it's always been a bucket list of mine," she says. It proved a turning point for her career, the moment right before everything boiled over: "After that was when it got really crazy."

The singer dropped "Nasty," the lead single from her album Quantum Baby, during the first weekend of the music festival. By the second weekend, the crowd knew all the words. A TikTok of a Black woman and an unassuming, nerdy-looking white guy dancing to the song quickly went viral, as if to say that everyone—even someone who looks like your accountant—had a freak they needed matched.

After that, opportunities popped off. She was being offered brand deals (a back-to-school collab with Urban Outfitters; a skincare campaign with Cetaphil) and guest appearances (the Usher tribute at the BET Awards; Dick Clark's New Year’s Rockin' Eve) left and right. She had to change tour venues to something bigger after increased ticket sales. For years, despite a consistent output and critical acclaim, trying on various genres and collaborating with other artists, the singer had yet to really break through to the mainstream. In Hollywood speak, everything changed overnight.

Before she is a singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, artist and creative visionary, Tinashe is, first and foremost, a millennial, which means she spends an inordinate amount of time on X, formerly known as Twitter. The number of people she follows could populate a decent-sized college town, clocking in at nearly 90,000 people. In hopes of undoing any algorithmic bias, she wants to know what everybody is up to. Undoubtedly, she sees the comparisons between herself and artists like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, who've enjoyed similarly massive mainstream success in 2024 after years as underground darlings. Chronically online ones might call this a "release from the Khia asylum," a meme about a fake purgatory for artists who have yet to break through.

But does Tinashe believe that she's finally broken through? "Yes and no," she tells me. "It was really validating to have a quote-unquote hit again; to have everyone talking about me. But at the same time, it's so fickle, so you can't put too much on those moments."

Instead she wants to focus on the big picture, which is no longer about the tangibilities (x number of Grammys, y number of No. 1 songs) and is more about remaining innovative and meticulous, holding herself to high standards, and retaining creative control. If there were to be a single, literal Big Picture to represent her career, it might be a poster of Janet Jackson. When I run through a list of her career inspirations—Britney Spears, Sade, Christina Aguilera, the Jacksons, both Michael and Janet—she lights up at the legend's name. "To me, she's all of the things that are peak entertainer: music videos, musicality, genre hopping, professionalism, dancing, acting," Tinashe says. Last year, Jackson remixed Tinashe's track into her own 1986 hit, "Nasty," which Tinashe called a full circle moment. Jackson's song was Tinashe's inspiration for her own: "Nasty Nashe" was her gamer tag, but she identified with the descriptor so much that she got it on a diamond necklace, with "nasty" written in a romantic cursive.

The devotion to Jackson makes sense. We expect so little from our pop stars these days. If you can't sing, there's a producer who can fix your pitch as it comes out of the microphone. A singer who can't dance has many tools of distraction at her disposal: visuals, back-up dancers, monologues, surprise guests. Producers and low-key collaborators can write the songs if the star doesn't have the chops. Tinashe, on the other hand, is adept at all of the majors offered at the Janet Jackson School of Pop Stardom: singing, dancing, and song-writing. In fact, it's hard to find a Tinashe track where she hasn't contributed lyrics. Ricky Reed, a producer on "Nasty," called her one of the greatest melodic songwriters he'd ever worked with, in part because she's so in tune with her body. "She's got to be able to picture the choreo," he says in a phone interview in January. "I think it has to feel as good in her body as it feels coming out of her mouth.”

Like with many of her songs, Tinashe came up with "Nasty" while driving. For years, when she was living with her parents, she got used to writing songs in her car, sitting in a parking lot and freestyling for hours, swaddled in solitude. Now, she writes more in her home studio, or places like her grandparents' home in Iowa, a "really pretty town with trees," to feel grounded and focused. What is she writing now? When can we expect new music? We’ll get there.

Over our appointment, Tinashe proves herself to be a straight shooter; she's acerbic and assured, allergic to bullshit. I ask her if she ever takes fan feedback into consideration: "Absolutely not," she says flatly, her mouth in a straight line. She loves her fans, but doesn't want to limit herself to anyone else's idea of who she should be. After all, that's how her career began.

Originally a child actor, Tinashe joined an energetic-pop girl group, The Stunners, in 2007; by 2010, they were opening for the rising superstar Justin Bieber. After the group split up the following year, Tinashe went solo, signing with RCA Records in 2012. The singer felt misunderstood by the label, which she felt tried to pigeonhole her. After some awkward forced collaborations with Chris Brown and R. Kelly and having songs sold away from her without her knowledge, she left RCA in 2019, and has been independent ever since. "There's a very big part of me, perhaps the Aquarius in me, that's very contrary, so as soon as someone says I should do this, I tend to do the opposite, even if they may be right,” she says.

Her Leo moon, on the other hand, comes up in her career. "Loving to be on stage, wanting to be perceived, putting myself out there—I don't really relate to that in my real life, even though…that is my real life," she says. "There's an interesting disconnect between my artist persona and my day-to-day, where I don't want to be the center of attention." Makeup, she says, helps distinguish between the two, shifting her into performance mode. On television sets as a kid, she'd study the makeup artists, trying to copy what they did. She doesn't wear much makeup on the daily, but [when I’m performing] "I can tap into that and it makes me feel like I'm turning on this character." She pauses. "When I say character, it's not a separation. It definitely still feels like me."

Tinashe-at-home, though, is markedly different from her stage counterpart: She loves to be in the house with her cat PJ, playing Call of Duty and watching documentaries. She keeps a tight circle: her best friend of over 20 years, her cousin, her parents and brothers who she sees nearly every day. "It's helped ground me in the industry, because it helps me really connect with myself. I've never felt like, amongst those people, that I have to be performing all the other things that the industry requires you to do,” she says. “I can always return to this feeling grounded, feeling like myself—never having to change."

Quantum Baby is, somehow, the 32-year-old singer's seventh studio album, as well as the second chapter of a trilogy, starting with 2023's BB/ANG3L. Though the albums are released a year apart, the singer tells me she started making the entire series at once, plotting how she wanted each part to sound. "Part of the reason why I love rolling it out this way is that it does give you the ability to change it and adapt it," she says. "A lot of times, artists make a song and it doesn't come out for a year," because of label processes and hold-ups. "Now that I've been on tour and had the year that I've had, I want to go back to the studio and restart the process."

When we talk again in January, she's still waiting to find enough time—ideally, about a month—to dedicate to finishing the album. "As much as I have started working on it, when I get in the studio and start experimenting a lot of the time the direction I want to go in changes," she says over Zoom. Fans will have to wait for new music, but perhaps there are hints to its inspiration. "I've been listening to a lot of Radiohead and I've been vibing,” Tinashe tells me.

The pressure is in getting it right, not from a label forcing her to work under a certain timeline. Being independent “allows me way more space,” she says. “It helps who I choose to work with, people who are also true creatives and constantly pushing themselves. That's always more fun." Critics praised 2019's Songs for You, her first album as an indie artist, noting that dropping her label only upped her game. "The vibe is that of an extremely talented R&B artist getting back to cooking after a deep, cleansing exhale," read one review.

And because she's independent, it's easier for her to be as hands on as she possibly can, calling the shots on everything from lighting cues to choreographers to set lists. That's the way she prefers it: The creative design for the brand of "Tinashe" is actually run by Tinashe. For visuals, she keeps a mental rolodex of inspirations—experiences she's had, art, architecture, film and music videos—but she remains open to the ideas finding their way to her, a process she likens to a spiritual download. "A lot of the things are inspired by another thing that I've done, like a continued conversation," she says. "I'll write a song and then that song leads to an idea, that then shapes the rest of the rollout, or the album, or the creative. I allow the ideas to reveal themselves to me in a way."

In Janet Jackson's song "Control," Jackson, too, worked out her frustration with controlling forces over her career: I don't wanna rule the world / Just wanna run my life / So make your life a little easier / When you get the chance just take control. Tinashe, in more ways than one, has been listening. She is particular about how she is seen and heard; if there's anything to take away from her career, it's that she knows best. On tour, she does her own makeup: "I can make my own face look nice in ten minutes," she says, though admits that she's no professional. I tell her I'm sure it's close enough. "Sometimes, I think it's better," she says, her voice like a wink.

Photography Tracy Nguyễn | Stylist Ashley Furnival | Hair Jacob Dillon | Makeup Artist Paloma Alcantar | Manicurist Alex Jachno | Set Design Cecilio Ramirez | Director of Photography Samuel Miron | Assistant Camera Taha Sobhani