i love pop music - i always have. when i was 11 my favourite app on my phone that wasn’t named “Minecraft Pocket Edition” was this weird Chinese music app that served as my free ‘streaming’ service platform (anyone could post mp3s on there, they had pop danthology dude). everyday i would take a look at the top 50 chart the app had for some reason, sifting through the a weird mix of radio hits - some hittier than others, and that was a form of catharsis for me. as a kid with not many friends and severely lacking a sense of community, listening to pop music on my janky ass headphones and then hearing these same songs on the radio made me feel connected to something bigger than myself. it felt good to be in the know of what sounds ‘good’ at this current moment, to have listened to these tracks so many times i could pinpoint the same few production choices or chord progressions or song structures. i love pop music, but i can’t say that love hasn’t waned over the years.
pop is in a really weird place right now. a torch has been passed and plenty of big names are fading into really ugly radio-tiktok-slop hell, but said torch has been passed into some really dubious hands. there’s so much to be pessimistic about, and so much that just compels you to brush off anything on the radio altogether and think “they don’t make anything good anymore. and did they ever really?”
underscores - U (2026) changed my mind on that earlier this year, showing me that there might be a future on the way where pop music sounds like what i want to hear again, and that popstars with sauce and swagger are back for real this time. and now Tinashe has just gone and totally blown my mind with this brand new album of hers. i realised i’d never really thought of Tinashe as a “popstar”, not in the mid to late 2010s, and certainly not even when “Nasty” blew up. i sincerly apologise, Tinashe. i was not familiar with your game at all.
THIS is a fucking pop album. now a lot of the sounds on this album are by no means revolutionary, but i reacted so viscerally to them being utilised in this setting. Tinashe brings such swagger to this, just cruising over some of the nastiest instrumentals i’ve heard in pop in a while and talks her talk and walks her walk and doesn’t even beg you to dance because she know you already started doing just that halfway through the first track. it’s kinda funny that Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore is my favourite track off this album, then. it truly is one of the most insane things i’ve heard this year - a crossover of Tinashe’s unbothered swag over a super industrial instrumental that would’ve fit right on the recent Nine Inch Noize project. this is everything i never knew i needed, and that’s what pop music has and will always be about.
will Tinashe ever be seen as a popstar the way the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Doja Cat are perceived and hailed? i certainly don’t care, and i don’t think even an iota of desire to become that sort of artiste has ever entered Tinashe’s mind. hell yeah dude
Fav Tracks: Melatonin, Flashbacks, Crash Out, Pillow Fight, Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore, Brainrot