Bathroom Selfies & “Girl Mess” With Rachel Chinouriri

Rachel Chinouriri is having trouble describing the aesthetic of her new album era. “I’ve been told I can’t say ‘sparkles’ too frequently,” she tells me, right after correcting herself. “I was in media training, and they said that I should use some different vocabulary. So I need to say ‘iridescent.’”

She’s referring to the outfits she’s been wearing recently on tour, in the lead-up to her second studio album, I Think I Spoke Too Soon, out Oct. 16. The 27-year-old Londoner is in New York for a show at Bowery Ballroom, and we’re nestled into a red-pleather booth at HiLot cocktail bar in the East Village before she catches her flight home. As she tells me about the galaxy-blue Agro Studio set she wore on stage, complete with a capri that “made my ass look fantastic,” she admits to suffering from a little brainrot. “I feel like I used to be so smart, and now, asked to describe something, I’m like, ‘That’s so tea.’ But there are other words than ‘tea,’ ‘period,’ and ‘sparkle’ that exist.”

It’s a funny position to be in for a girl who writes for a living. Chinouriri won over fans and critics alike with heart-first alt-pop anthems and meticulously crafted tales of young womanhood. But since her breakout album, 2024’s What a Devastating Turn of Events, earned her her an opening gig for Sabrina Carpenter last year and bigger venues of her own, she’s been on the track to capital-P Pop Stardom — and now, her new project is giving her a chance to look (and sound) the part.

“Trauma dance. That’s my vibe. I like to have a little cry, but keep it moving.”

“I feel like I can be very girly right now,” she says, flipping her shiny, waist-length hair as she leans back into the checkered pink backing of the booth. “I was on stage before with my big chunky boots, and now, I’ve got my little heels. I just like how feminine I feel.” She and her stylist, Shannon Kelsey Ann, have been inspired by Kylie Minogue and Madonna (specifically the Material Girl’s iconic “Hung Up” video) while crafting her tour wardrobe. “I don’t want to be too sexy because I actually don’t really think that's my personality, but I do like to have my ass out when possible, so I can have a bit of a dance,” she says. “I love a belt. So that’s the kind of vibe.”

It matches the groovy, disco-tinged fever of I Think I Spoke Too Soon, which Chinouriri describes as an accidental pivot. “The album actually started off quite indie, but then I wanted to have a bit of a funky sort of thing.” So she brought in songwriter Eli Teplin — who played on Lorde’s Virgin and has credits on Justin Bieber’s Swag duology — to add a little groove. “He expanded the world where the more I worked with him, the more disco it got,” she says. “I was like, ‘This is a vibe that I love and enjoy.’ I just maybe never thought it was something that I could dabble in and do because I had so securely cemented my indie thing.”

The album may sound like a party, but don’t be fooled — it’s as much of a lyrical gut punch as Chinouriri’s past work. “Trauma dance. That’s my vibe. I like to have a little cry, but keep it moving,” she says, as I mimic the “crying girl dancing” meme to describe how the songs made me feel. On “Broken Chair,” she repeats the line “I feel so, so sad again” against layers of glittering synths behind her, and the result feels like experiencing a night-on-the-town crash out in real time.

In fact, Chinouriri conceived the album as telling the story of a single evening out, particularly the moment it turns from fun chaos to existential dread. “It starts with ‘One Song Away From Crying,’ and then you hit the other party, and then you hit the afters, and then you’re walking home in the early morning, and you’re like, ‘I hate my life,’” she says. Think of it as trauma dumping to your friends at the club, where you can barely hear each other over the bass: “You’re telling them the worst thing ever, and then you’ve got the one friend who’s healed who’s like, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing again?’ And you’re kind of loving the drama, but you’re drinking, being like, ‘I have to think about this later.’ It’s, like, girl mess, which I love.”

“I just maybe never thought it was something that I could dabble in and do because I had so securely cemented my indie thing.”

But unlike her first record, “where I had to be in the trauma to write about it,” Chinouriri is happy to report she’s on the other side of said girl mess. She’s been sober for about a year, for one, which has helped her reflect on her 20s with newfound clarity. “Sometimes in my most confident phases, when I was drinking loads and being like, ‘I’m hot, men fancy me, and my career’s going great,’ I wonder if I was actually even that self-confident and self-assured. Maybe that was just me masking some other underlying self-value things,” she says. “I was like, ‘Am I running away from what I actually feel like who I am?’” She still parties now, just without the self-repression. “I still have those elements in me, but [I deal with them] in a much more healthy way, which I love.”

Another source of joy in her life: her boyfriend, Isaac, who became a character in the Chinouriri-verse after she name-dropped him in her 2025 single “Can We Talk About Isaac?” They’re now living together in North London. “He’s my shayla,” she says, quoting the TikTok meme. (There’s that brain rot again!) Her new song “Aaahhh!!!” is something of a sequel, about the panic of realizing the connection is turning into something more. “When I met Isaac, I was saying to everyone, ‘I’m going to be single for a whole year.’ I understood how to detect a f*ckboi. I was like, ‘OK, this is brilliant.’ And then I met him and was like, ‘He’s actually quite a serious contender here. He’s actually really sweet, and I fancy him.’”

It was a good problem to have — but it also meant she had to get her commitment issues sorted out ASAP. “I was frustrated because I was like, ‘I can see that if I don’t change my habits and ways, I could actually f*ck this and be a bad partner to him,’” she recalls. “So now I’m like, ‘F*ck, I thought I was going to have more fun.’ But now my life is more fun with him."

With a trans-Atlantic flight ahead of her, she’s counting down the hours till she can see him — and change into the one outfit she really wants to be wearing: a hoodie down to her knees. “Minus my career, I wear the exact same thing consistently,” she says. “Eighty percent of my life is me dressing up and walking around, so the 20% I’m not doing that, which is what Isaac sees, is me in the same tracksuit.” The iridescent outfits are for her on-stage persona, and for the fans, who clocked her style evolution instantly. “I feel like they’re kind of surprised, in a slightly gagged way. They’re all a bit like, ‘Oh, electric blue? She’s got heels on stage. Sh*t, we’re going to have to change our tops now.’” It turns out she’s growing up right along with them.