The Singles Jukebox

I mean, have you seen the price of cold cuts lately?

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[6.79]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: So catchy that it’s become the background radiation of my mind.
[9]

Crystal Leww: Earlier this year Tinashe was playing Knockdown Center in New York and a friend of mine tweeted that tickets were $5. I really did check because it did seem like a believable reality at the time which is really all you need to know about whatever is happening with Tinashe in the year of our lord 2023. 
[3]

Ian Mathers: I don’t have, like, a list but I suspect/dimly remember that there’s at least a microgenre of sex jams with videos set in innocuous backdrops like the grocery store found here. But I don’t recall any of them seeming like they had quite as much fun there as Tinashe and her dancers do; fitting enough for a song that doesn’t do anything particularly novel but does it all with such frank matter-of-factness and confidence that it feels fresh.
[8]

Frank Falisi: How can you tell that a singer is a good dancer? I think maybe it’s in the voice. I think maybe a voice is a thing that can be wielded and conceived of as entering a physical space like any other limb. I think maybe Tinashe proves that. “Needs” is a paean to get and give that puts the pleading back in pop music, an apparatus that approximates us by asking to take up our time and space for three minutes or less or so. Crucially, Tinashe’s voice choreographs that approximation in terms of necessity instead of luxury: everything here is just plain simple needs, like breathing and being. The voice prepares a body for wanting. It clips and jabs, wups and garbles life. There’s a pitch shift here in the first minute or so that feels like a somersaulting step, like the total inversion a beloved can inflict on a body. It makes me gasp, which makes me aware of my voice. It puts us head over heels, moved and moving.
[8]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Tinashe running around grocery store aisles with a turkey pan on her head, Tinashe wearing deli meat as an outfit, Tinashe twerking on top of containers of nuts, Tinashe riding in a grocery store cart. The “Needs” music video is an instant classic for the same reason the song slaps: it’s effortless and clean and simple, but doesn’t take itself too seriously. This is the type of cool that enjoys itself, the kind that’s unconcerned with anything but having a good time. 
[8]

Leah Isobel: What does Tinashe have left to prove? Songs For You demonstrated that she can make creatively satisfying crossover pop without a major label; 333 was an ebullient victory lap that pushed her art outward in all directions, uniting her most experimental tendencies and her most down-the-middle melodies behind her star presence. She could fuck off for, like, five years and still have people (me) frothing at the mouth for her return. But of course, the industry doesn’t work like that: if your job is to make music and perform, you have to keep clocking in. “Needs” finds a way to make those obligations both transparent and irrelevant; “They ain’t never seen moves like these,” she sings, as if she’s still a new artist, as if there isn’t ample evidence of her staggering physical skills. It’s branding as much as it’s boasting. But we — I — come to Tinashe for that outsized confidence, the easy bravado masking tremendous effort. And “Needs” still delivers where it counts, with a warm bath of a chorus that stretches on and on and on. Even when she’s just punching the clock, she’s generous.
[7]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: It’s great when Tinashe gets silly, something that was in short supply during her embargo at RCA, where she square-peg-round-holed into trends or pushed onwards with her gothic mumblings. Her most recent album, BB/ANG3L, could do with a few more athletic sex-comedy routines like “Needs.” Over queasy West Coast keys, Tinashe’s filtrated voices bawdily narrates a hook-up, where there’s teasing and power-play but no humiliation. It’s all very silly and rather human: “I’m just human, we all got needs,” she lilts in the warmest of shrugs, like it’s really that easy.
[9]

Alex Ostroff: A decade on from Tinashe’s initial mixtapes — which were heralded as the emergence of a talented new left-of-centre voice in R&B who was just a little too vibey and ethereal and uninterested in big shiny hooks to take over the mainstream — Tinashe has returned to that position, following a brief detour into the world of major labels that tried to DJ Mustard her way into pop hits. She’s made two compelling albums since going independent again that mostly exist in her midtempo R&B comfort zone. “Needs” exists in the same space, but feels slight and tossed off. It’s catchy enough that it only took 2 or 3 listens before “peaches, banaaaaaanas” was permanently embedded in my brain, but by its nature its pleasant, wispy and low-stakes.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: I’ve always heard an empty sadness beneath Tinashe’s singles, even the ones (which is most of the big ones) that aren’t meant to be. “Needs” is supposedly gleeful — watch Tinashe grin all throughout the strip-club Supermarket Sweep video. But its musical palette is all resignation: vacant handclaps, synths flickering in and out like the lighting of an abandoned floor, minor-key melody delivered with almost no flirtation or embellishment, like the checked-out cadence of “Big Spender“; the fact that the phrase “we’ve all got needs” usually comes with the implication that they aren’t currently being met. The fact that no one else ever seems to hear this makes me worry that maybe this is some kind of projection on my part; but I can’t hear anything else, and the resulting tension between sound and intent makes “Needs” more compelling than it should be. For instance: That buffet line because wasn’t sexy on Katy Perry’s “Bon Appetit” either.
[7]

Alfred Soto: She mastered this midtempo sex jam years ago; 333, the best album of 2021, was a middle finger to challengers. She can record these melodies over click tracks forever. In the best of Tinashe’s midtempo sex jams I hear more at stake.
[6]

Will Adams: As a single, it’s serviceable, with Tinashe going cruise control on a cutesy sex jam. But it’s a disservice to the otherwise excellent BB/Angel, where tension was the mode and, as a result, far more interesting. Docked an extra point for that weird vocal processing midway through that makes it sound like she’s suspended in Jell-O.
[5]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: BB/ANG3L is one of Tinashe’s best albums if only because it’s 20 minutes long — the maximum amount of R&B she can deliver before everything turns to mush. And “Needs” is indeed more of that nondescript, nocturnal mood music: gauzy synth pads, a minimal beat, her voice flitting in the ether. That lone verse is the best part, her vocals slurred as she sings about getting eaten out — the brashness matches the dingy, dimly lit atmosphere. Artists with 10x her budget would make being horny a glamorous, extravagant, all-consuming affair. As an unimaginative songwriter and perpetual C-lister, Tinashe can’t quite do that, and so she sticks with meat-and-potatoes production and finds the lyrics to match.
[6]

Michelle Myers: Nashe seems to be enjoying herself again. Perhaps my perception is colored by its twerking-in-the-grocery music video, but “Needs” feels more like a dirty joke among friends than a genuine attempt at seduction.
[7]

David Moore: I enjoy the Ryan Leslie-esque synth clouds, but the song goes beyond circular to samey — a mass of wispy gray stratus clouds when they needed to be little fluffy cumuli.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Not entirely certain why she bothered with a verse. Maybe she had nowhere else to place the peaches, bananas. A short, spare song but there’s still room to ponder whether the simp sucks or not. (The verbal abuse feels central to the action.) Great singsong chorus, even if I keep hearing “talk real mean” as “taco meat”. 
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: An impressionistic portrait of desire intermingling with control that sets a rather low bar for itself, and then proceeds to leap over that bar with an abundance of style. And by “style,” I mean Tinashe doing violence to her voice in a way that’s meant to embody twin ideals of cuteness and menace, which has the knock-on effect of making her say “peaches, bananas” in a voice that sounds like it’s been taken over by the Shimmer from Annihilation. Now that’s just good clean fun, in my opinion.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: Nice song. Not sure why they shot the amusing video with Tinashe and her dancers having fun in a supermarket before they finalised the vocal though because there’s a fine line between sexy and bored in a jam and this is on the wrong side of it. Wait, what? This is the final version of the song and it’s not waiting on a re-recording to make her sound as fun as she is having in the video? You’re shitting me.
[5]

Jackie Powell: It is impressive that Tinashe was able to freestyle the final line in the chorus “we all got needs” which launched the entire concept for “Needs.” She told Dazed that she “just pressed record and played a beat” and a chorus was born. This track seems more like an extended hook or an interlude rather than a full song. The chorus and post chorus make up over 75 percent of the entire song. It’s fine this song was made for TikTok, but the only verse this song has contains a vocal distortion that ruins what came before it. Tinashe’s voice is smooth and sensual enough, it doesn’t need to sound like it’s underwater. I say Na-na-na, na-na-na to whoever decided that Tinashe’s diction had to suffer in the track’s only verse. She sounded like she was holding her nose.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Tinashe was always meant to be a mid tier artiste. She had both too many outer tastes to stay comfortable in conventional pop structures, but was too nostalgia heavy and cynical to drift into a more esoteric mysticism. She could dance, she could sing, she could dance and sing, in a world where neither of those things was novel to the marketplace or stunningly amazing, she could have comfortably avoided irrelevance and been scooped into the orbit of an actual star. But Tinashe has always charted her own path and set her own course, so instead she’s doing this slower than 120 bpm pop-R&B tune about satisfying the desires for pleasure and indulgence, the things music can easily achieve without breaking a sweat. Thank god for Tinashe.
[10]