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Tash VibeZ

Twenty-three tracks about the exact emotional weather of a relationship going wrong in slow motion. Whoever Tash is, she is a very sharp writer.

A songwriter working the small, precise end of heartbreak

Some artists you meet through a biography. Others you meet through a tracklist, and the tracklist tells you plenty. Read this one in order — "Dopamine," "Codependent," "Emotional Control," "On The Fence," "Afterthought," "Phone A Friend," "What A Lovely Mess," "Grass Is Greener," "Now I Don't" — and you have the entire arc of a modern relationship, from the chemical rush to the post-mortem, told in the vocabulary people actually use for it.

That vocabulary is the tell. This is writing informed by therapy-speak and group chats rather than by soul-ballad convention: attachment, capacity, patterns, the friend you call at 2am. It is a register that has become common in contemporary pop and R&B, and Tash handles it with more wit than most — "What A Lovely Mess" is a title doing real work.

What to listen for

The production stays deliberately out of the way: soft drums, close-miked vocals, arrangements that leave the lyric fully exposed. That is a confident choice, and it only works if the songs can carry it. Mostly they can.

"Phone A Friend" and "Emotional Control" are the sharpest pieces of writing here. "Blue" and "Blind" are the quietest. "Honey" and "For a While" lean warmer, closer to conventional R&B.

"London Boy" and "The Signs" are the ones with the most obvious hooks — useful entry points if the rest feels too interior on first pass.

A word of honesty: there are several artists recording as Tash, and the biographical trail on this one is thin. That is worth saying plainly rather than filling the gap with someone else's story. What is not in doubt is the quality of the songwriting on this particular set.

Twenty-three tracks for the drive home after a difficult conversation.

Go deeper

If this register of writing lands for you, there is a lot of it about right now and much of it is excellent. Snoh Aalegra and Kiana Ledé work the same clear-eyed relationship material. Mahalia is the sharpest British writer in this mode — her "Do Not Disturb" is a masterclass in saying the difficult thing plainly.

Ravyn Lenae, Amber Mark and UMI take the same emotional honesty somewhere more experimental musically.

And for the origin of this whole conversational, self-aware approach to writing about love, go back to Frank Ocean's Channel Orange and SZA's Ctrl. Almost everything in this lane is downstream of those two records.

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