Tinashe Says She Wanted ‘Popstar’ Album to Feel ‘Really Playful and Free’

Tinashe had just a couple rules for Popstar, her follow-up to 2024’s Quantum Baby album. Number one was to put out a cohesive body of work that “represented all of the things that make me me,” she told Call Me Daddy host Alex Cooper on Wednesday’s (Sept. 23) pod about the LP due out on Friday (Sept. 25).

Also: no rules.

“I don’t subscribe to like one particular sound, one particular genre. I’ve made records on this project that feel like dance records, like hip-hop records, like pop records, like R&B records,” she said. “And I think they all, to me, fall under this umbrella of pop star. And I wanted to bring that question or like bring that conversation to the table of what does it mean to be a pop star?”

That eclectic mix resulted from the 33-year-old singer coming into the sessions with “a real sense of play … like, just really playful and free.” What she emerged with by not going for the obvious was piling up contrasting elements such as a “really deep, bassy heavy” song with “floaty vocals,” or a dance-forward song with no drums.

Before dropping the LP, Tinashe made headlines in July with a wild promo video for the bouncy burner “Crash Out,” which she announced via a clip in which she smashed a car’s windows with a sledgehammer. In keeping with the album’s title, Tinashe said she wanted to surround the release with a bunch of classic pop star tropes and act outs. “I was like, ‘we should do a stunt,'” she explained. “Like, we need a gaggy moment. And it would be really funny if people didn’t know that it was a stunt … like a true publicity stunt.”

Specifically, she didn’t want to make it an obvious album promo, hoping that people who don’t follow her would see it online and wonder, “‘What the hell?’ and that’s exactly what happened. So it worked. It was fun. It was great.”

In addition to talking about getting caught in a few situationships over the years and learning not to care too much what the chronically online think, Tinahshe recalled the time the girl group she was in at 14, The Stunners, opened for Justin Bieber.

The singer’s first-ever experience in the music industry taught her valuable, lifelong lessons about being in recording studios, going on tour and navigating a professional singing career. Plus, being on tour with JB was “so amazing,” especially for an avowed Belieber. “I was so happy to be there,” said Tinashe of the point in time when Bieber, also a young teen, was blowing up.

“It was really palpable in the room … I still to this day probably have not heard the decibel levels in an arena that loud,” she said of the volume at JB’s shows. “The screams were out of this world. And I just remember getting so overwhelmed with emotion and excitement and just being like, ‘this is where I belong.'”