Tinashe – Popstar

Astronomers didn't put the constellations in the sky. They looked up at thousands of individual points of light and decided certain ones belonged together. Conveniently, that solves our problem with Tinashe giving us 16 songs to discuss.

She's specifically asked that Popstar be heard in order, explaining that she put considerable thought into its “storytelling / journey / sequencing.” So we're following instructions. No skipping around. No moving stars. We're simply connecting them as they appear.

And the first one arrives wearing “Sunglasses.” It's a hell of an opening statement: grand, strange, immediately confident and somehow capable of folding the various corners of Tinashe's musical universe into one very thick pair of black shades. Her voice slips between sass and a ridiculous falsetto while Arca's production keeps revealing tiny intricacies underneath. Sunglasses after dark have always been an objectively unnecessary accessory, but that's also sort of the point. Practicality has never made anybody look like a pop star.

“Too Easy” follows, which we've already spent some time obsessing over around here, before “Melatonin” arrives and promptly ignores everything its title suggests. It's my favorite on the record: four-on-the-floor, down and dirty, sophisticated pop with a little Club Kid crawling around inside it. The video only strengthens the case, stretching movement into slow motion while Tinashe cycles through choreography, costumes and characters with the kind of ease that makes an enormous amount of work look suspiciously like instinct. If this is melatonin, check the dosage.

There are quieter stars along the way, but we're connecting the ones that burn brightest from where we're standing. “Crash Out” has that windows-down, head-nod confidence of someone who knows a meltdown can still have excellent production. “Pillow Fight” pulls more R&B into the orbit without abandoning pop. And then “Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore,” the album's release-week focus, presents a complaint Tinashe seems personally committed to disproving. People may have stopped dancing. Tinashe has not received the memo. Watching her move has always been part of understanding the music, and here the beat, vocal and attitude meet right down the center. Maybe nobody wants to dance anymore because she's made the entry requirements intimidating.

Then there's “Brainrot,” which basically kicks a hole through our carefully constructed telescope. Voices mutate. Personalities appear and disappear. Tinashe flips into this animated, almost babyish delivery and races through something that feels over-the-top, avant-garde and knowingly ridiculous. Apparently there are still more versions of Tinashe. How many sides can one star have?

That's ultimately what Popstar gets right about its title. Tinashe has spent years refusing to choose between R&B, dance, electronic music, hip-hop and pop, and this record doesn't suddenly begin drawing borders. She can arrive in extravagant makeup and an impossible look or jeans and a T-shirt and the gravitational pull remains exactly the same. The voice is there. The production is there. The choreography is there. The confidence is absolutely there. A pop star isn't one fixed point. It's the picture that appears when you connect all of them.