Is it a mixtape? Half of a double album? Ultimately, who cares? Nightride is the first sizable tranche of new music from Tinashe, whose Aquarius album (2014) catapulted the newcomer to the status of R&B superstar-in-waiting. With Joyride, Aquarius’s official follow-up, repeatedly delayed (“sometime in 2017”), Nightride plugs the gap with a series of hazy, gauzy tracks. Theoretically, Nightride plays a nocturnal yin to the more pumping yang of Joyride. Tracks such as standouts Ghetto Boy and Lucid Dreaming are suitably languorous, but listen in and Tinashe is trying to wrestle her life back under her control on the latter, coining the word “forbes-gasm” in the process. Over 15 tracks (three are interludes) your eyelids do start to get heavy, but this is more than just a set of oneiric offcuts.
