“Yesterday I called my lawyer,” Tinashe is saying. “I was like, ‘You need to trademark this immediately. It’s going to be in an H&M soon and you need to get on it.”
It’s June 14th and we’re speaking over Zoom. Four days after this conversation, Tinashe Music, Inc will file a trademark application for “Match My Freak,” the existential question slash earworm catchphrase from her Quantum Baby single, “Nasty.”
An undeniable contender for song of the summer, “Nasty” has become a siren song for sexually liberated brats and meme aficionados alike. Its virality was aided by an unlikely source—a fan edit of the Mclovin-esque dancer Nate De Winer. (“Is somebody going to match her freak?” Tinashe asks. Nate answers with a finger bite.) The single kicked off a Tinashe renaissance; it’s the first Tinashe song to hit the Billboard Top 100 since her debut single “2 On,” a 2014 ode to getting faded.
What’s sustained Tinashe’s career for over a decade is how tapped in she is to the internet. She embraced TikTok early on—she calls it her favorite app—while many artists moaned and groaned about their label’s forcing them to promote their music online. But she’s adamant about not creating music for algorithms. “I’m adapting in different ways,” she says, “by dropping my album in three parts, seven songs each, to make little bite-sized waves that people can really get into every single song, and not participate as much in this quick pump and dump culture, this quick, overt, very fast consumption.”
Her terminally online queer fans will be the first to let you know that her impact is far-reaching but often goes uncredited. From upcoming pop artists emulating her Songs for You cover and Beyoncé sounding eerily like her on the second half of the Renaissance track “Thique” to contemporary K-pop groups being molded in her image, Tinashe has been the industry’s unsung trendsetter. She’s not mad about it: “That’s the point of making art, is to continue the conversation with other creatives. So I get really excited. I think it’s a compliment.” She laughs when I ask if she would ever consider creating her own K-pop groups. “That would be fun,” she admits. “I move to Korea and become Simon Cowell?”
Tinashe sees Quantum Baby as part two of a trilogy that began with 2023’s BB/ANG3L. It’s more cerebral than her previous projects, but maintains the emotional yet danceable quality of her earlier work; she says she was inspired by Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time,” Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, and Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. She says she played one producer Jackson’s “Empty” as a reference track for a song called “Enough”; the song didn’t make the final album, but Jackson’s influence is felt across the tracks that did.
Since parting ways with former label, RCA, in 2019, Tinashe has enjoyed creative control as an independent artist. According to her, RCA pushed her more towards pop when she wanted to cultivate her R&B sound, delayed her album (Joyride) for years, and pressured her into collaborating with abusers like Chris Brown and R. Kelly. Earlier this summer, she responded to a TMZ reporter’s question about RCA with her characteristic frankness and joviality: “We didn’t need them. All you need is hard work, good fans and talent. I know they gagging.”
