In October 2017, Rachel Chinouriri had her first panic attack. The timing couldn’t have been worse. She had just landed her first major gig as a professional musician, opening for Celeste at Laylow, a members’ club in London. Out of nowhere, she started to spiral. “I don’t know what happened,” she says. “I just started having a mental breakdown.” Her manager told her to go home and try again next time. But that only made things worse. “I started feeling like I was wasting everyone’s time,” she says. “I started feeling ashamed.” She decided it would be better to go on stage and sing, “half crying.”
Tears were already a familiar part of Chinouriri’s performance anxiety. The first time she sang in front of her classmates at the Brit school—the performing arts institution that trained Adele, Amy Winehouse, and many others—she burst into sobs afterwards. It’s a rather inconvenient habit for someone hoping to be a pop star, but at least she got the humiliation out of the way early in her career. “That was a big milestone for me,” she says of the Celeste show. “The fact that I could stand up there completely embarrassed, with people looking at me like, ‘Don’t really know what’s up with this girl,’ but I still got through it and everything was fine.” The experience taught her that the catastrophic scenarios in her head rarely come true. “I’d given myself this pressure of, ‘This is the music industry. If they think I’m rubbish, I’m never gonna perform again.'” Chinouriri rolls her eyes at herself.
The 27-year-old’s triumph over stage fright has been more impressive than most. It’s a sweltering Friday in July—30C outside and even hotter in the small restaurant she’s chosen for our interview—and Chinouriri is having an excellent week. On Sunday, she performed to a crowd of 45,000 at Wolf Alice’s homecoming show in Finsbury Park. She’s the latest artist they’ve picked as a support act, following in the footsteps of Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, Florence + the Machine, and many others who have been drawn to the fearless, bare-souled lyricism that runs through her contemporary take on indie music. Last night, her former Brit school headteacher handed her the trophy for best new music at the O2 Silver Clef awards. It was her first-ever award win, after nominations at the 2025 Brits and 2021 Ivor Novellos. Melanie C was at the ceremony and later followed her on Instagram (“I will absolutely message her straight after this”).
How did she celebrate her big win? “I put on my glasses and left! I was in the heaviest metallic dress and it was like a sauna in there. Looking back at all the images, I’m just, like, wet on stage.” Today, Chinouriri is dressed in more appropriate heatwave attire: red micro shorts, a strapless top, and flip-flops. She scans the breakfast menu, though she hardly needs to. Café Palestina is one of her favorite spots in London, a short ride from her home in Camden. She orders a Palestinian breakfast and an assortment of kibbeh and stuffed vine leaves to share, then leans back into her seat.
There’s another reason for Chinouriri’s good mood. This afternoon, she’ll hand in the final version of her forthcoming second album, I Think I Spoke Too Soon. The title is quite literal. “In my early 20s, I was so self-assured of who I was, then my frontal lobe hit and I went: ‘Nah, I’m actually not that person,'” she says. Chinouriri says she has recently learned about her Saturn return, the astrological milestone said to upend your late-20s. “I feel the shift. I thought I knew myself. Now I look in the mirror and I’m like: ‘Is this actually who I am?'”
It’s a big question, but not a new one for Chinouriri. Growing up in CRoydon was the only one of five siblings born in the UK, after her family moved from Zimbabwe. Her mother ran a strict Christian household while also caring for her sick father. Both parents had fought as child soldiers in Zimbabwe’s war for independence. In the UK, they struggled to get by. “But they always turned it into a giggle,” she says – even when the power went out. “Games would start getting invented. You’d get given the electricity meter key and walk to the shop to put £5 on.” She smiles fondly at the memory of them all sprinting to complete the task. “They found a way to turn struggle into something beautiful in order to survive.”
At a mostly white secondary school, Chinouriri faced her own battles, enduring racist bullying so severe that one pupil was suspended and another expelled. She was spat on, called the N-word, and tormented with monkey noises as she walked through the corridors. Eventually, Chinouriri enrolled herself at a more diverse school, pretending to be her mother on the application form. “The first school taught me: don’t stay where you’re not wanted,” she says. “I hit points where I felt like dying. But afterwards, I was like: ‘I can leave here with my head raised high.'”
A few years later, she made it to the Brit school, the state-funded incubator for British pop stars and actors. Chinouriri was in the same school year as Olivia Dean and Cat Burns; Lola Young was just a few years below. “I wasn’t in any of their classes, but they were three names I heard constantly – the rumours were right!” At home, her musical tastes stood out. Forbidden from listening to non-Christian music, she and her siblings would argue over which TV music channels to watch while their parents were at work. “My sisters were big lovers of B2K, Brandy and Destiny’s Child. When I was in charge of the TV, it would be Oasis and Coldplay.” But at the Brit school, the singer found a place where being different was kind of the whole point. “There was a girl who used to paint herself like an anime character every single day and walked around the school like it was normal,” she says. “I loved that level of expression and freedom.”
When Chinouriri released her debut album, What a Devastating Turn of Events, in 2024, she laid everything bare. The title track recounts her cousin’s suicide after an unwanted pregnancy; another song wrestles with self-worth and body dysmorphia; on My Blood, she sings about self-harm. The candour resonated, and its songs were streamed hundreds of millions of times. “All my songs feel a bit like a journal entry, even if I make it sound like a pop song,” she says. “It’s always deeply embedded in my thoughts.” It also resonates when her lyrics turn to romance: her song Dumb Bitch Juice has become an anthem for fans weathering toxic relationships. As Chinouriri’s friend and collaborator PinkPantheress tells me, “Her youthful, melodic approach truly encapsulates the state of modern romance among people our age. She makes heartbreak warm and tolerable, even in the most painful situations.”
Chinouriri is now in a healthy, long-term relationship. These days, she sings about heartbreak from a distance: reflecting on past flings to better understand herself, instead of “writing through something I’m trying to survive,” she says. “I began asking myself: ‘Why do I attract these people?’ The fun obsessions or meet-ups I used to love actually came from a place of desperation, loneliness and seeking validation.”
When her album was released, much of theThe media spotlight often focused on Chinouriri’s presence as a Black woman in indie music, a genre that has historically been tied to white men. Part of that attention was her own making. In 2022, she called out the industry on Instagram for wrongly—and frankly, in a racist way—labeling her music as R&B or soul. She said, “You see my colour before you hear my music.” Her album What a Devastating Turn of Events leaned heavily into guitar sounds to make a statement. “That had to happen because I was really fighting for my place in indie pop,” she explains. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if she ever got tired of questions about race.
“I feel like…” Chinouriri looks up, squinting as if the answer might be floating above the table, then speaks slowly. “It was an important and necessary part of the story to pave the way for myself in pop, indie, and alternative music. I’m glad I’ve played a part in that. I love going on TikTok and seeing a new Black pop or indie girl with 10,000 likes and no one questioning it.” So, has the industry made progress? Another pause. “I can say there’s been progress because I’ve benefited from it. But when I look left and right at festivals, I’m still the only Black girl on the lineup—or it’ll be me and Cat [Burns]. The fact that two Black pop girls who went to the same school are getting booked around the UK… That’s interesting.”
Chinouriri at Field Day festival in London, 2019. Photograph: Lorne Thomson/Redferns
Her new album, I Think I Spoke Too Soon, turns the focus inward. “My first album was about how I was perceived as a Black woman in this space. Now it’s about how I perceive myself in this space,” she says.
The record marks a major shift from her earlier work, drawing on her longtime pop idols like Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Donna Summer, Prince, and LCD Soundsystem—influences that might have complicated her fight against being pigeonholed during her last album cycle. “As much as I love indie sleaze, I love me some Madonna,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to recreate that sense of carefreeness I felt when I first heard songs like ‘Hung Up.'”
Bright synths replace the Britpop-inspired guitars, and melancholy hooks turn into singalong sad bangers. There are still hints of her old style: rich harmonies, confessional lyrics, and the occasional indie track thrown in for good measure. But as she sings on the lead single, “One Song Away from Crying,” this is mainly an album meant to “work it out on the floor.”
If anything, Chinouriri’s darkest moments feel even more cathartic against a danceable beat. For example, when she tackles her relationship with alcohol on “Broken Chair,” she sings the euphoric chorus from the perspective of feeling sorry for an abandoned chair on the roadside: “You look lonely, but not me / I’ve got plenty of friends until the last call.” The same theme shows up on “The Good Fight,” one of the first songs she wrote for the album. Around that time, she decided to go sober. “I didn’t have too much of an issue with drinking, but I just looked at myself and thought, ‘This is not my happy place,'” she says. Up until then, her party-girl image had become a running joke with her fans. “I was out with a friend and she posted a selfie of us. My fans were like, she’s about to tweet, ‘I’m tipsy!'” Without seeing their prediction, she did exactly that. “It was pretty funny. They know me well.”
Chinouriri replies to group chats with her fans more often than she does with her family. Recently, her team looked at her audience and found it skews heavily queer. “I was like, ‘This is fantastic!'” She went straight to the group chat to share the news. “I was like, ‘Announcement: everyone in here is gay and this is beautiful.'”Chinouriri has a packed few months ahead, with shows lined up, including a spot at Rodrigo’s first-ever Daisy Chain Fields festival in California and joining Abrams on tour across the US. She’s already telling fans what to wear to match her new vibe: “Blue, silvers, purple, shimmery iridescence. It’s going to be so fun.”
When she supported Carpenter on tour in Europe last year, Chinouriri “felt like I was traveling in this Sabrina universe.” Every billboard had Carpenter’s face on it, everyone seemed to be wearing her merch, and every café was playing her music. “It was so cool to see how she’s thought about her fans, even at that level, and the community they’ve built. I’d love to have that one day.”
At the Finsbury Park show, one fan held up a sign that read: “When I don’t belong, her music calls.” Maybe that feeling comes naturally from Chinouriri’s own struggle to be heard. “Whatever happens, if I do get pigeonholed again, so be it. I fought really hard. I tried my best,” she says. “But I need to trust that it won’t happen because I have found a way to know who I am.” At least for now. “You can change who you are at any moment, as long as you reflect and forgive yourself first.” I Think I Spoke Too Soon is out on 16 October via Parlophone/Atlas Artists.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the phrase In my early 20s I was so confident Then my frontal lobe developed
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What does my frontal lobe developed actually mean
Its a humorous way of saying your brain finished maturing The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for reasoning impulse control and longterm planning It fully develops around age 25 which is why you suddenly start thinking before you act
2 Why did I feel more confident in my early 20s
Ignorance is bliss Before age 25 you lack the brain wiring to fully grasp longterm consequences You also have less life experience so you dont know how badly things can go wrong That lack of fear feels a lot like confidence
3 Is this a real medical condition
No its a cultural meme Its a playful way to describe the very real neurological shift that happens when the prefrontal cortex finishes maturing Its not a disease its just growing up
4 Does this mean I was stupid before I turned 25
Not at all It just means your decisionmaking was based more on emotion and immediate rewards You werent stupid you were just wired to take risks which is actually a natural part of leaving your parents nest
5 Is it normal to feel less confident now than I did at 22
Yes completely The confidence you had was often just a lack of awareness Now you know all the ways things can fail which makes you more cautious That caution feels like a loss of confidence but its actually just wisdom
AdvancedLevel Questions
6 What specific changes in behavior happen when the frontal lobe matures
You shift from reactive to proactive thinking You start to
Pause before reacting in an argument
Think about retirement savings instead of just next months rent
Realize your parents were right about that expartner
Feel anxious about risks you used to take without a second thought
7 How is this different from an identity crisis
An identity crisis is about figuring out
