It was the evening of Aug. 3, and Tinashe and Disco Lines were enjoying the perks of their success.
Sitting in a hot tub in Las Vegas with a crew of friends and family, the pair raised glasses of Dom Pérignon and toasted accomplishing the rarest of feats — making the rare dance crossover hit.
Earlier in the day they’d performed this song together live for the first time ever poolside at the city’s lavish Fontainebleau resort — with Tinashe sauntering around onstage in stilettos and singing while Disco Lines worked the decks and the crowd before them bounced along to the beat.
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Widely considered dance music’s — maybe any music’s — 2025 song of the summer, the duo’s teamup “No Broke Boys” has spent the last 11 weeks on the Hot 100, peaking at No. 39 and currently situated at No. 41. It’s generated 91.2 million on-demand official U.S. streams and 292.8 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate. In August, it ascended to the No. 1 spot on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, unseating Marshmello and Kane Brown‘s “Miles On It” which had been holding down the top spot for more than a year. It also reached No. 1 on Dance/Mix Show Airplay in August and is now at No. 3 in its 14th week on the chart.
The song has also gone top 20 on 13 of Luminate’s International Charts, peaked at No. 2 on The Official U.K. Singles Chart and hit No. 7 on the Canadian Hot 100.
“I think it’s just catchy as hell,” Tinashe says of what’s driving the song’s success during a group Zoom with Billboard and Disco Lines “It’s fun for the summertime. It’s got that energy. It’s very tongue-in-cheek. It gets people going.”
The song is a take on the penultimate track from Tinashe’s 2024 album Quantum Baby, with the Disco Lines collab dialing up the BPM, adding an urgent synth production and loading up the track with bright and bouncy electronic flourishes. This version went viral after Disco Lines, the Colorado-born whose real name is Thadeus Labuszewski, played it during a set at EDC Las Vegas 2025 this past May.
“I played it at EDC, and then I played the collab in San Diego, and every time, everyone jumped,” says Disco Lines. “So I was like, ‘Tinashe, ‘Check this s–t out.’ Then a bunch of people kept using it on the internet, and it just gained momentum.”
“Yeah, it popped off,” adds Tinashe. “It went crazy.”
“I saw the initial edit at EDC, the little clip,” she continues, “and at that point we linked up through some mutual friends. I was like, ‘Well, this is f–king great’ and just wanted to build it out from there turn it into something super impactful.”
At this point the pair were working remotely, with Tinashe going in the studio to re-record some of her vocal elements so the collab would be, she says, “super crispy and super new and fresh.” The duo, both based in Los Angeles, eventually linked IRL to make photo and video content. “That was when the final version really came together,” says Tinashe.
One only need listen to this final version to get why it undeniably works, but beyond the “catchy as hell production” Disco Lines thinks part of its secret sauce is that “it tells a story, and we don’t see that in electronic music very often anymore.” Written by Tinashe, Ricky Reed and Michael Neil, the Quantum Baby version of the song tells the story of getting a call from your ex, who you swiftly reject because he’s broke and you’re better than that.
“Tinashe did an incredible job writing it,” says Disco Lines. “You can feel that [group of girls] energy when you listen. Everyone has had an ex that’s hit them back, and you’re like, ‘Stop banging my line.’ Everyone can relate, even me as a guy. I love the lyrics, and I think the writing Tinashe did is just so strong.”
The success of “No Broke Boys” is a quantum leap of a profile booster for Disco Lines, the producer who’s been on the scene for years, with releases going back to 2019. Tinashe has of course been a force in R&B for more than a decade, and has clocked hits across Billboard charts — including four other Hot 100 hits, most recently her 2024 smash “Nasty.”
She’s also been in the mix in the dance world for years, collaborating with Kaytranada on 2019’s “The Worst In Me” from his Grammy-winning album Bubba, appearing on the “b2b” remix on Charli xcx‘s 2024 album Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat and scoring a Dance Club Songs No. 1 with her 2016 Britney Spears collab “Slumber Party.”
But the “No Broke Boys” pair agree that despite their respective profiles, the song’s success is putting each of them in front of new audiences and parts of the industry. “The fun part about music is that you can go in and create new versions and make different iterations of the same song, and it can speak to totally different people,” Tinashe says.
“It’s been fun to see the trajectory of the song and see it grow and it change and evolve into something that can speak to an entirely different group of people and bring an entirely different group of ears to the to the song,” she continues. “It’s exciting to see how music can evolve in that way.”
Doing the interview for this story the day after getting back from a 10-date tour in Asia, Tinashe reports that “No Broke Boys” was connecting with audiences even on the literal other side of the world. “It was so fun to see people singing that song all the f–king way in Asia,” she says.
Disco Lines reports the runaway success has also broadened his horizons by “opening up sessions with a bunch of hip-artists and higher caliber artists, which has been amazing.” While he says says he’s been relatively chill all summer in terms of producing new music, he recently had a session with Shoreline Mafia, which helps him on his mission of continuing to branch out from dance music.
Whatever other opportunities the song might open up, the pair agree, will be decided by the same “energy of the universe,” as Tinashe calls it, that’s made “No Broke Boys” a smash.
“We really haven’t had to make anything happen,” she says. “It’s just felt really natural, and I think that’s one of the most amazing things about it. So we’re going to keep going with the vibes, continue riding the waves and see what happens.”
