Tinashe explores her vulnerable side on the sleek, strong Popstar

“Think I’m gonna lose it,” she declares on the thumping “Crash Out”, “I don’t even care no more.”

As someone who’s voraciously chased stardom since the age of 14, her unflappable persona has rarely signalled that the strife has gotten to her, smiling slyly while whipping through athletic choreography. But here, the facade drops: the haters are getting loud.

Tinashe’s eighth album, Popstar, lays bare the anxieties and struggles of the path to fame. Her eyes on the cover harbour circles of stars, distant and tiny, suggestive of a glimpse of what she's been pursuing rather than a fully-fledged dream. Its no-frills title might feel as sexless and perfunctory as an occupation checkbox on a doctor's form, but Popstar is by far her most vulnerable and burning album, and it might just be her best too.

My ears first perked up with “Too Easy”, the album's thudding and jerky lead single. “I feel like a celebrity,” she sings. But why only “feel”? Despite business disputes and her constant underdog status, Tinashe has never succumbed to others' underestimations. This is, after all, a woman who once said a documentary of her life would need “fifty sequels” – and that was six years before the commercial peak of “Nasty”. Popstar isn’t hindered by this baggage, but boosted by it. It’s a metafictional buffet fit for an artist whose music is consistently being talked about, either too much or not at all.

The album picks up the trail of other self-aware projects that dissect the pain of showgirl-ship like JADE's That’s Showbiz Baby! and Charli xcx's Music, Fashion, Film, but with sharper teeth and a ruthless gaze. “If you win the rat race and you come in first place, then you’re still a rat,” she reminds the world, indicting her own ambition in the process.

“Music my religion,” she repeats on the juddering, Arca-produced opener “Sunglasses”, and later narrows her voice to a whisper as she details a dream “so vivid that I woke up sick” – a completely empty stadium, “waiting for applause that’ll never exist." Being underrated is a compliment, somewhat, but will it translate to validation? Ticket sales? Is it worth spending your life there? Tinashe analyses the construct of a popstar while indulging in her primary form of communication: an out-and-out bop.

The country-lite stomper “Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore” is less of a complaint and more of a celebration, while the title track’s boasting, 2010s sing-out-the-window chorus epitomises the duality of the life of a star, the “glitter in the gutter.”

Despite worrying if she’s traveling too fast, “Cloud 9” is a noticeably non-anxious track, a popstar belting in the pummelling void. The piano plinking and glitchy drops of “Flashbacks” contrast with its taunts of “Running butt-naked ‘round the house!” Most of Popstar exists between the hazy soul of Nightride and the futurist electronica of BB/ANG3L and Quantum Baby – pop’s magnetic, dark underground.

But the record’s magnum opus is “Melatonin”, Popstar’s sizzling core. A relentlessly fun four-minute techno rampage that never lifts its foot off the gas, it buzzes with energy ferocious enough to forgive the title’s overused cliche (“Sleeping on me, need some melatonin”.) “Back door, back door / Passport, passport,” her voice swirls, lost in a flurry of flights, helipads, and sleepless nights. “I never wanna stop partying, I love this shit!” goes one TikTok-sampled woman, integrated surprisingly well. These songs are sleek, strong, and just really cool.

For all of her career, Tinashe has questioned what it means to be a popstar, and here, she does so explicitly. But Popstar is less of a thesis statement than a coming to terms with the identity she's chosen for herself. “What does it even mean to be 'pop' these days….” she wrote on social media two days before the album’s release, clearly still figuring it out. She asks herself during the title track, “Tell me, is it everything you thought it’d be?” The album seems to be proof enough.