After Tinashe initiated exit talks with RCA, news broke earlier this February that she had officially split with the imprint that she called home since 2012. But by that point, she’d already begun work on her fourth album, Songs For You. Released in November, it marked her first full-length project as an independent artist. The moody tracklist, headed up by the sneering Die a Little Bit featuring Ms Banks, calls back to her earlier mixtape work, bubbling with ideas that, true to form, careen between genres. This time, the reaction was surprisingly different: Songs For You vaulted to No. 1 on the iTunes album chart, and non-single Save Room For Us featuring MAKJ launched to the top spot on its R&B chart.

For Tinashe, the record’s success signalled that trusting her gut and forging ahead on her own had been the right choice all along. ​“If I want to put something out or I think this is the song or move, it’s not overanalysed, it’s not strategised to the point where it takes the soul out of it. It’s not hyper-curated,” she says. ​“It’s just instinctual.”

That also meant abandoning the need for chart success. It’s something she fell into and struggled with in the years signed to RCA, and you can’t help but notice that tracks like Superlove reached for a persona that simply wasn’t her own. ​“It came to the point where I was chasing whatever a hit may be and trying to sell these genres or box myself in sonically, which I never felt fit who I was,” she says. ​“With this project, it was important I get back to creating something that was important for me. But at the same time, I also had the realisation that that is what my fans want as well. That’s what they are going to respond to the best, is stuff that feels really legitimate to who I am.”