Earlier this year, Tinashe was driving alone, her laptop open to Photo Booth in the passenger seat, when the idea for her viral single “Nasty” struck. She was playing the beat she’d just confected with producer/songwriter Ricky Reed (Lizzo, Camila Cabello) off her phone, mumbling along to the sparse, hollow instrumental as she recorded herself on the computer. Shortly after, she returned to the studio with Reed, restructured the song and went home to lay down the vocals with an engineer.
Ever since she first teased it on Valentine’s Day during an Instagram Live, “Nasty” has become the second act —or third, or fourth, if you’re counting — in Tinashe‘s decade-plus career. The fly-your-freak-flag anthem has become her most prominent hit since 2014’s “2 On,” her only solo single to crack the Billboard Hot 100 where it peaked at No. 25. Though “Nasty” is still technically bubbling under — it bowed at No. 6 on the R&B Digital Song Sales chart, and is yet to hit other tallies — it’s become a cultural event, memeified across social media and, if the cards are played right, could be a potential summer smash.
“It’s amazing. I’m just so thankful,” Tinashe tells PvNew. “I was saying this to my mom the other day, 10 years later, who would have thought? And I didn’t need this moment. I came to the place where I didn’t need that validation anymore. And I think that makes it even better, because it’s like holy shit, the universe just worked in such mysterious ways.”
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The success of “Nasty” is sort of old school, culling the type of democratized virality that major labels have struggled to achieve in the rise of the internet. The fact that Tinashe is now an independent artist, formerly signed to RCA, only heightens its trajectory. She released the song to coincide with her dual Coachella performances in April, when a few clips of the performances gained thousands of retweets on X (formerly Twitter). She then leaned into the buzz on TikTok, and noticed users starting to tweet lyrics. Something felt different right away, not because of how listeners were reacting, but because of how it resonated across the industry.
“I noticed a difference almost immediately because I started getting hit up by my peers, and I feel like people see my content all the time but it’s very rare I’ll get a DM from Meghan Trainor being like, ‘I love that song,’ or Kehlani or Tyla,” she says. “There was a group of people within the first week that I dropped it that were messaging me being like that’s that shit. So to me, I was like, OK, this is different. Unusual.”
It was when TikTok user Nate Di Winer posted a video of himself dancing to Hey Choppi’s “Blind” that the track went into orbit —not at first on TikTok, where “Nasty” has now been used in almost 100,000 videos, but on Twitter, where user @grruessome overlaid “Nasty” onto Winer’s clip. Tinashe has been social media savvy throughout her career, and green-screened herself onto the video in a TikTok post that now has 5.4 million views. “It’s been a snowball avalanche since then,” she says.
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