Charli XCX gave Austin City Limits two days of warning. On Wednesday she posted "acl weekend 2 i have a surprise for you" to X, and the guessing in her replies leaned toward Madonna or Lorde.

Madonna made sense, since Charli features on her new single "Danceteria Afterhours," and Lorde was already one of the festival's headliners. The answer instead walked onto the American Express stage at Zilker Park on Friday night (Oct 9), when Tinashe stepped into Charli's headlining set. She came out in skin-tight red leather with her hair pulled into a high ponytail.

She opened with the live debut of "Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore" from Popstar. She followed it with "Melatonin," the August single, which fan-run tracking accounts logged as getting its first live performance that night too.

Not everyone in the field stayed for it. A reviewer for The Baylor Lariat watched large groups head for the exits once Tinashe took over, while still calling her performance the sharpest thing on the stage. Clips posted overnight drew replies from fans who said she deserved a livelier crowd than the one standing in front of her. The song she chose to open with is called "Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore."

The guest slot followed a pattern Charli set one week earlier. On ACL's first weekend, she used the same Friday headlining spot to bring out Troye Sivan, her partner on the Sweat Tour, for two of his own songs. This time Kings of Leon, booked for weekend two only, shared the Friday headlining bill.

For Tinashe, the Austin crowd arrived barely two weeks into her best chart run yet. Popstar, her eighth studio album, came out September 25 through Nice Life and Atlantic with sixteen tracks and no guest features. Ricky Reed, Zack Sekoff, Machinedrum, Kingdom, and Arca are among the producers. The album opened at No. 6 on the Billboard 200 with 35,500 units, her first top-10 album twelve years after Aquarius peaked at No. 17.

"Melatonin" had a head start on the rest of the record. Reed, Sekoff, and nightfeelings co-produced the track, which arrived August 13 with a 91 Rules video built around ballet, hip-hop, and ballroom dancers. We heard it at the time as a hazy pop spell with a point, and on Friday the choreography from that video came to Zilker Park with Tinashe carrying it herself.

The two artists go back further than the festival circuit suggests. Both appeared on Ty Dolla $ign's 2015 single "Drop That Kitty," with Charli on the chorus and Tinashe on the bridge and pre-chorus. Tinashe returned for the "B2b" remix on Charli's 2024 remix album, Brat and it's completely different but also still brat. In an interview with ABC Audio about that reunion, she pointed to shared mileage. "We've both been making music for 10-plus years, we've been in the game," she said.

The Austin American-Statesman's recap of Friday's set still ran a "Who is Tinashe" section for its readers. It pointed them back to "2 On" and "All My Friends," two singles that are now more than a decade old. Fans following the clips online answered with a request aimed at the festival itself, posting that ACL had better uplift her.

Her own calendar fills quickly from here, starting with a spot at FORM Arcosanti, the Arizona festival running the same October 9 to 11 weekend. Her "Three Nights With a Popstar" run, announced in July as the first time she would perform the album live, opens later this month at the Salt Shed in Chicago. It reaches the Brooklyn Paramount on October 24 and closes at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on November 7.

The Grammy Museum has also booked her for an intimate performance and Q&A on October 22. On the same day as the Austin set, she was announced for Chappell Roan's Super Graphic Spectacular, a two-day charity fundraiser in Los Angeles.

Chicago, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles were sold as the rooms where fans would hear Popstar first. Two of its songs got there early, in a field in Austin, on someone else's stage.