Pop singer Tinashe was spotted smashing a car with a sledgehammer, but she had a very good reason.
In a viral video spotted on X/Twitter, Tinashe was seen smashing a white car with a sledgehammer. It seemed like a surprising crash-out. That was, until later, when it was revealed that this was a promotional stunt for her new single, fittingly titled “Crash Out”.
The song is from her forthcoming new album, Popstar, out September 25, 2026, via Atlantic Records. You can stream “Crash Out” below.
Tinashe’s newly announced Popstar will mark her eighth full-length studio album. She has released an album roughly every two years since 2014. The most recent was 2024’s Quantum Baby.
Around the time she dropped Quantum Baby, Tinashe sat down for an Interview Magazine conversation with her friend and frequent collaborator Kaytranada. During their conversation, Kaytranada noted that many of Tinashe’s fans have been “confused” that Tinashe hadn’t “broken through as a mega pop artist until now.”
In response, Tinashe offered her own take on her trajectory. “I’m not sure why the zeitgeist has kept me in some type of niche category. But I’m in a great position,” she said. “I have fans that love me, I’m able to tour, I’m able to make the art I want to make. So I’m pretty satisfied.”
“As much as I want all the success and the accolades, I have such a great career, so I’m thankful. But I don’t know why,” Tinashe continued. “It could be the universe. It could be the way society’s set up. Being a Black woman in music is difficult.”
Tinashe has had two songs certified platinum by the RIAA: “2 On” (2014) and “No Broke Boys” (2024)
She then added, “There’s been a lot of discrepancy over how to market me. In my early days, people were confused by my genre hopping and my lack of commitment to an urban direction.”
As for whether she feels “pressure to cater to certain tastes,” Tinashe said she “used to” but not anymore. “Now I have the freedom to do whatever I want,” she explained. “But I did in my early days, like when I was signed to RCA after having just made my first mixtapes.”
“I don’t think it was insidious, but over time I started making more and more compromises,” she continued. “They had these expectations of what kind of artist I was, and the type of music that I was making wasn’t aligning with their vision of either a pop star or an urban star.”
“I was somewhere in between, and that wasn’t palatable for them in terms of marketing and stuff,” Tinashe finally added. “So I definitely started to feel the pressure to mold myself in either one direction or another, which led to a lot of internal confusion, creatively.”
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