Tinashe & Key ‘Popstar’ Collaborators Go Behind the Scenes of Her Career-Defining Opus: ‘We Have to F—k People Up Beyond Repair With This Music’

Tinashe is on Cloud 9.

Related The Future of Pop Music Is Approaching and Black Women Are Leading the Charge — Why Aren’t They Also Leading the Charts? (Critic’s Take) Tinashe’s ‘POPSTAR’: All 16 Tracks Ranked How Tinashe Scored the Biggest Album of Her Career With ‘Popstar’ Her current state of professional euphoria also doubles as the title of the penultimate track on Popstar , the album that earned her the biggest sales week and highest-charting project of her career when it debuted at No.

6 on the Billboard 200 two weeks ago (chart dated Oct.

10), with 35,500 units earned —22,000 of which were pure sales.

The acclaimed multihyphenate, 33, is deboarding a plane as we catch up exactly one week after Popstar began its envelopment of the current zeitgeist.

In a few hours, she’ll perform a pair of Popstar songs as a special guest during Charli xcx’s headlining Austin City Limits set — a coronation from one long-underrated pop architect who finally clinched a mainstream moment to another under-recognized pop polymath, on the precipice of what looks to be her own culture-dominating era.

“I’ve never created my art to fit the charts or chased success in that way, but I’ve always felt it would be very nice to receive that kind of validation,” Tinashe says.

“To go from mentally and emotionally unsubscribing from all that to finally be kissing the top 10 is a big dream come true.” Tinashe’s Popstar moment has been a lifetime in the making.

Born to professor parents in Kentucky, Tinashe came of age in Los Angeles, embarking on an entertainment industry odyssey that landed her a role in 2004’s The Polar Express, a spot in the late-‘00s girl group The Stunners and a Masked and Anonymous in-movie performance of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that drew praise from famed film critic Roger Ebert.

After establishing the genesis of her bedroom pop-meets-alternative-meets-dance-meets-R&B sound with a trio of early-2010s mixtapes, she signed with RCA Records, kicking off a tumultuous journey that resulted in major highs like 2014’s quadruple-platinum “2 On” (with ScHoolboy Q) and much-publicized lows like the complications surrounding the release of 2016’s Nightride and 2018’s Joyride .

By the top of 2019, Tinashe regained her creative control and entered an era of independence, re-establishing herself as one of the most innovative minds in the pop ecosystem with that winter’s Songs for You.

“[That album] was a big deal in our label offices,” Nice Life Recording Company founder and Grammy-winning Popstar producer Ricky Reed tells Billboard .

“All the kids loved it; it was such a good album.