Khan is moving away from her previous staples of animal totems and the sparkling headbands that have become a ubiquitous fashion accessory. Right now she’s really into “lots of spray painted, Jean-Michel Basquiat-type vibes, clothes that are quite ’80s and street looking.” She’s also fascinated by skin printing—a process of painting and stenciling patterns and pictures onto the body—which she credits to her ex-boyfriend. Khan is not only spray-painted for Two Sun’s front cover, she spent a December day having the face of Daniel Larusso, the Karate Kid protagonist and her childhood crush, painted on her naked back for the “Daniel” single’s artwork“.

Khan is not religious, but Two Suns does begin with her singing from the Song of Solomon, excerpts of which she read in Hubert Selby’s Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. When Khan was little, she would travel with her father to Pakistan to visit his side of the family. Rehmat Khan is the famed squash coach who trained his cousin, Jahangir Khan, to become a world champion player. Khan describes her father as “very charming and artistic, a little bit unreliable, immature and selfish.” He is also a devout Muslim who encouraged the traditional five daily prayers. “I think for a long time [religion] was quite an enigma,” says Khan. “I took the ritualistic side—the washing before you pray, the repetition of words—but paradoxically, I didn’t know what any of it meant.”

When Khan’s father left her family when she was eleven, “everything flip-reversed” and she found herself at Christian school singing hymns in the morning, even though religious practice wasn’t something Khan’s English mother enforced. “Later I decided to find something more concrete that I could understand experientially,” she says. “But what religion helped me with was storytelling. I’m interested in creating your own mythology and using imagery to deal with human emotion.”

One of the stories that Khan tells that hasn’t bled into her lyrics yet is a moment on a beach in Malibu last year. “I was walking along the shore, crying because I was having a really bad day, singing to myself and feeling emotional,” she recalls. “The sun was setting and a school of nine dolphins came swimming by. My girlfriends were like, Tasha! Oh my god! It’s your spirit animal! I needed to reach out to some kind of objectivity, some universal cosmic something. You can just drown in the vortex, but when they came, it snapped me out. To see the beauty of being, they’re so free and wild.” Khan says that this actually happened twice, although the second time, her presence only brought three dolphins to the shore.