When Rachel Chinouriri calls, she’s at the gym. But not for exercise, necessarily: for the showers.
“We're living on a tour bus,” she tells me over the phone. “Obviously there are no showers, so I just come to any gym that I can find. We’re staying in a truck station because it's the only place a tour bus can stay, so you're with old men truckers, looking at a bunch of 20-year-old girls, being like, ‘what the hell are you guys doing here?’”
In case that anecdote hasn’t made it clear, Chinouriri is a busy woman – and she’s about to get a whole lot busier.
2024 has been her year for the indie-pop artist. She has a new critically acclaimed album (titled What a Devastating Turn of Events) under her belt, has played Glastonbury’s Other Stage and headlined the Introducing Stage at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend festival.
The cherry on the cake: being announced as the support act for Sabrina Carpenter's upcoming Short’n’Sweet Tour. She’s come a long way from her childhood in Croydon – especially considering her early musical education.
“I was quite gatekept from music, because my mum didn’t let me go to gigs, my mum didn’t let me listen to non-Christian music, so I kind of had to discover music on my own accord whenever I could,” she tells me (though her parents are supportive of her career, too).
That led to an early love of Coldplay, and to Chinouriri beginning to write and record her own songs at home, using a £20 microphone and the music-sharing website SoundCloud to get her work noticed. And it was: her frank, confessional lyrics, laid against upbeat pop melodies, were a dynamite combination that saw her take off first on TikTok, then in the charts.
A spell at the BRIT School (alongside contemporaries like RAYE and Cat Burns) followed, as well as her first-ever gig, which was, incredibly, at the BRIT Awards aged 17.
“I will never forgot Adele looking out into the crowd and saying something like... ‘I was one of you lot,’ and I’m pretty sure she was looking directly at me. And I remember that and being like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be there one day!’”
Chinouriri kept at it. Early success with the track So My Darling and EP Mama’s Boy led to gigs at Field Day and Pitchfork Festival. In 2022, she drunkenly messaged Lewis Capaldi asking to be the support act on his upcoming tour.
“I completely forgot until the next day and woke up and was like, ‘Why is Lewis Capaldi at the top of my Instagram DMs and it says, Seen?’”
Her gamble paid off, though: she was booked to be his support act shortly after.
A year later, Chinouriri’s star is still on the rise, and she’s keeping busy. With Sabrina Carpenter’s tour on the horizon and new music on the go – as well as a gig at the Kentish Town O2 this weekend to cap off her tour – Chinouriri is in an uncharacteristically cheerful frame of mind.
“I’ve been going to therapy and now I’m in a really positive mindset, and all my life I’ve written about my depression.” That’s changed: now, she says, the songs she’s writing are all about her new boyfriend. “I'm gonna have to learn to write from a positive place now,” she laughs.
