After more than a decade of niche popularity, the singer released “Popstar”—an album whose title was a self-fulfilling prophecy.At a sold-out show at Brooklyn Paramount, the crowd hollered loudest for Tinashe’s sassiest lyrics.Illustration by Bijou Karman; Source photograph courtesy Hugo ComteIn 2014, a twenty-year-old singer named Tinashe released a steamy track called “2 On,” which proved to be extremely popular and a little bit misleading. The song didn’t top the pop chart, but new listeners kept finding it, and then coming back to it; on Spotify, it has been streamed more than eight hundred million times. Over a low-slung hip-hop beat, Tinashe sings, “I love to get 2 on,” and then she explains what that means: “Get faded, turn up, bruh, pour it on up till I can’t even think no more / Get ratchet, go dumb, then go more dumb, then we can keep it lit, let’s roll.” Her delivery is seductive enough to make the two lines rhyme, and to make the anatomically specific guest verse, from the rapper ScHoolboy Q, seem entirely appropriate. Tinashe was brought up in show business, having worked as a child actor and as a member of a girl group, the Stunners, whose addition to the canon of bubblegum pop was a playfully robotic song called, fittingly, “Bubblegum.” The success of “2 On” seemed to herald her arrival as a grownup R. & B. hitmaker, ready to take her place among the genre’s gyrating headliners, with songs about hookups, heartbreaks, and nights out that were either unforgettable or unrememberable.In fact, the singer who made her name promising to “go dumb” turned out to be an uncommonly thoughtful and careful musician, turning out meticulously crafted songs that earned her a small army of fans convinced that it should be a big army. Tinashe struggled with her record company, RCA, which at one point released an earnest love song, “Flame,” which she evidently did not consider her best work. (“I cried for two days when they told me I had to put that song out as a single,” she later said.) For a while, she distributed her music independently, and then she joined Atlantic Records, which in September issued “Popstar”; the record could be considered Tinashe’s thirteenth release, if we count mixtapes and mini-albums. “Popstar” is a collection of songs that is partly about the twelve collections that preceded it—about, that is, the gruelling process of trying to become a pop star. Tinashe has said that one song, “Empty Stadium,” is based on a recurring nightmare about being trapped onstage with no audience and no exit. “I put the work in, and I waited / Don’t wanna die underrated,” she sings, and there’s no telling whether this is part of the same dream, or her wide-awake reaction.Happily, “Popstar” is a riotously good time, and also, it seems, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It débuted at No. 6 on the Billboard album chart, putting Tinashe in the Top Ten for the first time in her long career. On a recent Saturday night, she turned up at Brooklyn Paramount to celebrate, performing a sold-out show for about twenty-eight hundred fans, many of whom seemed as if they had been waiting for this moment even longer than she had. She appeared flanked by four dancers dressed, from the waist up, as paparazzi: black jackets, flashing cameras, no pants. She was singing the album’s titular song, asking, “Tell me, is it everything you thought it’d be?” On the record, the beat drops out, leaving Tinashe alone with stacked echoes of her own voice, which suggest that the answer is no. But for more than an hour in Brooklyn, the crowd left no room for misgivings, hollering loudest for the sassiest lyrics, and whooping every time Tinashe or one of her dancers lifted a leg or dropped a backside. A few days later, she got an endorsement from the Swedish singer Robyn, who incorporated part of “Popstar” into a live performance on BBC Radio 1. Robyn is probably the patron saint of cult-favorite pop stars, a designation that seems much less paradoxical than it once did, thanks to the rise of singers like Tinashe, who appear to thrive in their own cultural galaxies, whether or not they ever cross over into ours.In 2014, at the dawn of her career, Tinashe told an interviewer that her music was “rooted in a place of R. & B.,” and many of her early tracks have beats that are stately and restrained enough to let her carve out memorable vocal lines, enriched by well-chosen harmonies and ad-libs. The song “Nasty,” from 2024, marked a commercial resurgence, inspiring millions of TikTok videos, some of which showed users lip-synching the question Tinashe poses: “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” Part of what made the line work was the trancelike way she delivered it, as if she weren’t sure what had come over her; eerie keyboards and a ghostly beat echoed the unsettled mood. “No Broke Boys,” her other recent hit, pulled off a similar trick, pairing feisty lyrics with incongruously pensive music. Last year, the producer known as Disco Lines remixed it, building a muscular house track around Tinashe’s taunting refrain: “No broke boys, no new friends.” It became one of the year’s biggest dance tracks and has been streamed about a billion times on Spotify—drawing in, no doubt, plenty of listeners who knew nothing about Tinashe’s trajectory, even as they were helping to change it.One of the defining qualities of pop stardom is that it is bigger than music: hit songs help create vivid personas and vice versa, and today it is easier than ever to follow the semiprivate lives of public people. Tinashe, though, is more self-contained. She is poised and polite, offering fans no personal details to match the decadence and drama in her lyrics. During a recent conversation with Ricky Reed, who served as an executive producer of “Popstar,” Tinashe dissected “Nasty” with a music nerd’s exactitude. “There was a really interesting moment where we found that juxtaposition between, like, the minor chords and the major chords,” she recalled. (Once, when a radio host asked her to name celebrities beginning with the letter “T,” she started with Tori Amos, the melodically expansive singer-songwriter.) These days, Tinashe seems to be deëmphasizing R. & B., perhaps in keeping with her ambitions; during a recent interview, she said, “I always saw myself as a pop artist.” On the new album, her voice is smaller and the percussion is brawnier than before. She sounds enviably unhurried when she coos, “I know that I’m a superstar,” even though the drums are hammering away at around a hundred and thirty-six beats per minute, which is nearly as fast as pop music can get without turning into something else.Onstage in Brooklyn, Tinashe said almost nothing to the crowd besides “Thank you so much”—confident, perhaps, that the precision of her vocal lines and the prerecorded backing tracks would tell the audience everything it needed to know, and that people would arrive with plenty of their own unhinged energy. Pop stardom is a collaborative project, well suited to the social-media era, and this makes it easier for fans to participate, competing to express their enthusiasm in maximally hyperbolic terms. (When someone on X asked for an example of a historical event so glorious that it could be considered “the Opposite of 9/11,” a fan proposed February 6, 1993: the day Tinashe was born.) The crowd at Brooklyn Paramount was full of Black women and gay men, who have long been among Tinashe’s most voluble supporters, and when it came time to perform “Melatonin,” the new album’s raucous highlight, she brought fans onstage for a dance party, with men and women equally eager to twerk for their idol. When the show was over, she headed across the bridge for a d.j. set at a Manhattan night club, but some of the fans stayed put, continuing the dance party out on the sidewalk. For at least a moment, Tinashe’s world and the real world seemed like the same place.How long will stylized, self-conscious pop music remain in vogue? The wave crested in 2024, when Charli XCX—after years of niche fame—conquered the world with “Brat,” a brilliant meta-pop opus. Earlier this year, Charli seemed to announce a cultural shift when she released a song called “Rock Music,” declaring, “I think the dance floor is dead / So now we’re making ro-o-o-ock music,” dragging out the word as if she were stifling a yawn. And yet the pop era has endured. A playfully obnoxious pop auteur named Slayyyter has lately ascended to stardom; she is booked to play Madison Square Garden next summer. And JADE, a former member of the British girl group Little Mix, currently has a delayed-reaction hit with “Angel of My Dreams,” a 2024 song that perfectly evokes a bygone era of bombastic Euro-pop, morphing from a ballad into a dance track and back again. (It was the soundtrack to Kylie Jenner’s star turn at last month’s Victoria’s Secret fashion show.)It also seems clear that “pop,” always a nebulous term, is evolving. In Mexico, an emerging singer named FLVCKKA (pronounced “flaca”) is using sparkling keyboards and up-tempo rhythms to create addictive hybrids that can sound simultaneously dreamy and streetwise. On her new album, “Hypercorridos Vol. 1,” FLVCKKA marries the giddy sensibility of hyper-pop with the tenacious spirit of Mexican corridos, ballads that tend toward the extremes of triumph and tragedy. The record includes “Si No Contestas,” a duet with Marcos Villalobos that is not as playful as it might seem: it turns out that the lovers trading promises also happen to be carrying guns. On the album cover, FLVCKKA is surrounded by scantily dressed friends and heavily armed police officers: a pop star in her own mind, and maybe—with a lot of work and a bit of luck—elsewhere, too. ?