Charli XCX invited Tinashe onstage during her ACL Festival headlining set on Friday, giving fans the live debuts of two songs from Tinashe's new album, Popstar: "Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore" and the hit "Melatonin."
The surprise had been teased earlier in the day, when Charli was spotted dancing backstage at the Austin, Texas festival to Tinashe's music. A week prior, during ACL Fest's first weekend, Charli brought out her Sweat Tour tourmate Troye Sivan to perform two songs of his own.
Footage of the moment circulated on social media Friday. The account @infocharlixcx posted a clip captioned, "Tinashe performing 'Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore' for the first time at Charli xcx's Music, Fashion Film Tour in ACL Festival," dated October 10, 2026. A separate post from @tinashedata, also dated October 10, 2026, described the moment as "Tinashe joins Charli XCX onstage at ACL Weekend 2 for the first-ever live performance of 'Melatonin.'"
Charli and Tinashe's history stretches back a decade, to 2015, when both then-rising singers appeared as featured guests on Ty Dolla $ign's "Drop That Kitty." They reconnected nine years later for the "B2B" remix included on Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat. Brat, Charli's sixth studio album, represented the high point of her journey from in-demand songwriter to critically acclaimed artist to arena headliner. Tinashe appears to be on a similar trajectory with Popstar, her eighth studio album, which has already earned the strongest reviews and chart performance of her 12-year career.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in September, Tinashe reflected on that long road: "There's a lot of us girls who have been working and grinding for 10-plus years in the game. I can only speak for myself, but how I've felt is that I've been perhaps underrated. [We've] constantly just been working with our heads down, grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding. You get to a point where you kind of have this breakout moment. It's so exciting to see. I'm so proud and happy for all my peers and the girls who have been doing it for a decade as well who are getting their moment."
Photo: Sara Komatsu, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
