On a dank August afternoon in Manhattan, the sky has cleared over Washington Square Park long enough for 070 Shake to put me in check. We’re sitting on a bench near the city’s finest chess hustlers, playing the game Shake loves. I move my king away from certain death for the moment, but its turns are numbered. As the 22-year-old performer born Danielle Balbuena carefully maneuvers her pieces around the board, she talks to me about her debut album—the one people have been waiting for since she turned Kanye into a blip on his own song with her star-making hook on 2018’s “Ghost Town.”

When we meet in August, she has already been working on the album for a full year. But she’s not a perfectionist looking to add a dash of polish. In fact, the idea of releasing music that’s too synthetic frightens her. “It’s too Barbie right now,” she huffs. “I need to distort some vocals, make it more real. I don’t want to make it better, I want to make it worse.”

Shake’s eyes dart around the board, seeking openings. Her long, curly hair is draped over a crew neck depicting an endless loop that reads “You Bomb People -> They Get Angry -> They Bomb You -> You Get Angry.” She’s got a tattoo of the numbers 070 that looks like a percent sign near her left temple and a double helix near her right. There’s a crucifix wrapped around her neck, a gift from her girlfriend, model Sophia Diana Lodato, but she doesn’t identify as religious, only as a person with a strong relationship with God. “I grew up in churches but I have my own beliefs.”

It doesn’t take long for her to begin sharing those beliefs, on all sorts of topics. She calls social media an “evil force” and she’s wary of technology. She finds anarchist communes appealing. She considers the public school system in her home state of New Jersey one of the worst in the country (even though it was ranked No. 1 in the nation last year). She won’t take a hardliner stance on Trump, or Kanye’s support of him, but she mentions Hawaiian congresswoman and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as someone with vision who can make real, lasting change. She doesn’t care for cellphones and doesn’t even own one. “I don’t like to have to answer people, to have mad radiation, to be controlled by a device,” she says. “I like to live free.”

She picks up her knight and whisks my queen off the board in a single motion. “Check.”