Rachel Chinouriri: "It's exhausting to blame other people your whole life. It's good to just be able to try and fix it for yourself"

Rachel Chinouriri sits in the attic of Warner’s Dublin office on George’s Street, hands wrapped around a mug of herbal tea. At the time of our conversation, she’s in the middle of a string of headline shows in rooms where she can see people this close.

“I was doing loads of poetry nights when I first started, so it’d be like 10 people clicking every time you finish singing,” she says, laughing. “So, I guess because I’ve started from there, I enjoy the intimacy. I actually think arenas might be slightly easier.”

Last year, she was opening for Sabrina Carpenter in those arenas. Along with the singer whose surname was Jesus’ day job, Chinouriri has supported Florence + The Machine, Lewis Capaldi, Dermot Kennedy, Bloc Party and Wolf Alice.

We’re not here to namedrop, though. Chinouriri’s second album, I Think I Spoke Too Soon, is out in a couple of weeks. It’s a synth-heavy pop record, built around the idea of one big night out as a way of auditing her twenties.

“The person who I was, even between 22 and 25, is completely different from the person from 25 to 27,” she says. “I used to drink all the time, then on my 25th birthday, a week later, I applied for a marathon. I don’t run at all. I stopped drinking alcohol. Within months, I just suddenly was like, ‘Don’t want to do that, don’t want to drink anymore, don’t want to do this.’

FOLLOWING YOUR INSTINCT

“Everything started changing, cause you know, the moment you stop drinking when you’re a big partier, suddenly you have no friends, and things change quite a lot. I’ve realised that I can still party, and as long as I have a Coca-Cola, I’m alright. I can go till five in the morning.”

That explains why Chinouriri chose a night on the rip as her concept. “Oh, I love a night out,” she adds, her Croydon accent coming through. “I wanted to reflect the loop. I wrote it from 7pm to 7am. And you go out for the night, and then you’re like, ‘God, I hate it.’ It’s about following your gut instinct. Someone said, ‘Not following your gut instinct will be your future regret.’ And I do not remember who told me that, but I have never forgotten it.

“On a night out, you keep doing things to please other people. It’s very rare that you end that night and go, ‘That was a great idea.’ You probably just wake up hungover the next day and go, ‘Should have gone home sooner, should have done this, should have done that.’

“Now as a 27-year-old, I see 27, 28, 29-year-olds who are still in that loop, but I can see the spiral of something which could potentially turn into a car crash." Chinouriri can’t wait for 30 and beyond, when she’ll be richer and more sensible. She credits her mature turn with an “aggressive frontal lobe development.”

“I was quite self-destructive in that phase of my life, but not realising I was self-destructive,” she continues. “I thought I was really fucking cool. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m drinking, partying, going out, doing this.’ My career was going well, so I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’m having a brilliant time.’

“This album helped me do the inner work. Now I’m like, ‘Cool, I’m going to get wrinkles, I’m going to get old, I’m going to be irrelevant one day, there’s going to be another younger, hotter, stunning Black woman in pop who’ll accomplish more than I ever dreamed of accomplishing, and that’s fine, and people are going to start calling me old, and that’s fine.’”

Her 2024 debut, What A Devastating Turn Of Events, was mostly about things that happened to her: bad relationships and traumatic events. The title track told the story of a cousin in Zimbabwe who took her own life over fears that she had become pregnant, a stigma in her community.

“The first album maybe highlights the things that traumatised me and that I carried, and then this one is more like self-awareness, self-observation, and being a bit more like, ‘Maybe I’m the problem,’” she explains. “The first album is a bit more, and I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming other people, but it’s, ‘Oh, this has happened to me, and that’s happened to me.’

“Let’s use an example of, ‘Oh, a boy has fucked me over.’ Before it would be like, ‘Oh, men, that’s how they are.’ And then 25, 26, 27, I was like, ‘How was I accepting that behaviour? And what boundaries was I letting down?’ It’s exhausting to blame other people your whole life. It’s good to just be able to try and fix it for yourself.”

Much of I Think I Spoke Too Soon’s artwork depicts Chinouriri in the bathroom at the club, giving herself a staredown in the mirror. This kind of self-scrutiny has a cost.

“It was pretty traumatic, in many ways,” she says of the writing process. “You never really want to acknowledge that you’re the cause of your own sadness, even though other people can definitely cause you sadness. But realising, ‘Oh, I have to get myself out of this, and I have to forgive other people, or I have to forgive myself for letting myself down.’ That was quite a tough realisation.”

There have been questions of identity to grapple with too. In the past, Chinouriri has described the racist abuse she suffered at school. When she broke through, some industry figures automatically assumed she’d be an R&B artist. Others told her she sounded like a white girl. For a long time, her identity was something she had to argue for.

“I was very keen on solidifying who I was and my identity, and maybe, I want to say, proving myself,” she reflects. “Now I’ve gone the other route of, ‘Okay, I’ve done that and proved myself.’ And I know the last album I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself, but I’m like, if I keep going on about this thing, I’m going to end up almost making myself pigeonholed in another way.

“Let me speak about how free I feel and the other things that are fun and positive in my life. I don’t want my career to kind of reflect me as like, ‘Oh, what a struggle, she’s a Black woman struggling.’ I’ve done that. Now, let’s see a Black woman having fun and enjoying herself and reaping the rewards of success.

“I am who I am, and if people mistake me, then I’ve done my absolute best to try and make my identity clear.”

CORE FANBASE

Has her success made Chinouriri feel like she belongs more, or has it done the opposite?

“It’s weirdly the opposite,” she considers. “I belong to my core fanbase, I’m very close with my fanbase, but I think it’s gone the opposite in a way. I’ve lived my life like a normal person for many years. Then, the more success you get, you get treated in a different way. I’m someone who always thinks about community and team, but then I live a life which is very about me. You meet people who are like, ‘Oh no, don’t worry, you can do...’ something which might be, let’s say, impolite.

“When you’re around that 24/7 and everything is about you, if you don’t have, you know, family or friends or a fanbase who will humble you, and remind you of where you’ve come from, it can become very isolating. Cause then suddenly the whole world is about you and how you feel, and how you manage to live your life. You can sometimes feel a bit selfish.

“What’s real are the fans who come to the shows, and the storytellers and songwriters who I get the privilege of working with, and the art that people make. I always have to remember that’s the core of what I’m doing this for, around everything else.”

• I Think I Spoke Too Soon is out now.