When she began work on her sophomore album, “I Think I Spoke Too Soon,” Rachel Chinouriri reverse-engineered the entire process. The British singer-songwriter, who made global waves with her deeply confessional 2024 debut “What a Devastating Turn of Events,” got a big piece of paper and wrote down themes and experiences that shaped who she’s become over the past few years. “We had a bunch of song titles, but no songs,” she tells Variety over Zoom just days before the record’s release. “I saw a picture, but I had blurry vision. I was wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. And it’s like, I could see it, but I was like, why am I not seeing this thing properly? It was really cool having it all pieced together.”
Chinouriri ended up making “I Think I Spoke Too Soon” (out today), a concept album filtered through the lens of a bleary night on the town. It’s a record that grapples with the indecision and challenges of figuring out the person you are meant to become, largely substituting the thrashing guitars of “Events” for more synth-powered fare. It makes sense that the first song she wrote was “The Good Fight,” a dreamy, percussive thesis for the album where she sings of being “with the friends I fucking hate” and washing down drinks to numb her loneliness. “Do you like the way you can’t remember yesterday?” she sings. “Or do I like the taste of sickly bile and stomach pains?”
The 27-year-old is as candid as she is on the album while discussing how she approached it creatively. “It was like doing an autopsy of myself whilst going through it at the same time,” she says. Writing “The Good Fight” made her realize that she needed to go sober, leading her to examine the self-destructive and toxic loop of drinking herself sick. On “Broken Chair,” the album’s jaunty centerpiece, she looks back on how dire the situation had become as she stumbles back home after last call. “She’s throwin’ up into a gutter, it’s getting really hard to love her,” she sings. “I must be out of my mind, there’s people looking at me / I wonder what do they see.”
“[I was] dissecting the version of myself that I was before I was 26, between 22 and 26 and being like, who was she?” she says. “I hate throwing up. The amount of times I’ve sat on the floor throwing up in the streets London… Thank God there’s no recordings of me. But what was I doing? It’s not even the sort of person I am in any way, but I was doing it for fun. It made me feel almost a bit sad for myself.”
Despite the album’s darkness, there’s musical levity to “I Think I Spoke Too Soon,” inspired by artists like Madonna and Donna Summer, that creates a crying-in-the-club juxtaposition. Lead single “One Song Away From Crying,” for instance, is an ’80s synth bop that shimmers like light bouncing off a disco ball where Chinouriri feels the walls closing in on her: “I’ve never looked better and I’ve never felt worse,” she sings.
“I come from a family who went through a lot of survival mode as immigrants in the UK, and they coped with very deep and sad things through laughing or music or things that made them feel cheerful and happy,” she says. “So then that reflects in my music where I’m like, we’re going to dance through this, but I’m going to tell you the saddest things in these three minutes.”
Over the past few years, Chinouriri has built a growing fan base that identifies with her confessional songwriting and persona. During the Los Angeles stop on her headlining “Events” tour last year, she had the crowd in the palm of her hand, encouraging them to tell the person standing beside them that they love them, or to close their eyes and picture a place of peace. Communing with her fans is part of the Chinouriri experience, so much so that anyone who approaches her for a photo is also met with a real conversation.
“I try and normalize myself to my fan base as much as possible because as someone who used to be a fan girl on Twitter before I even became a singer and even when I started being a singer, I just didn’t think I’d even get this far,” says Chinouriri, who shares that she once ran a Coldplay fan account. That sense of online abandon continues to this day: Earlier this month, she called out an X user for posting a video where they ripped down one of her posters simply because it was next to one promoting Adéla.
“If I walk down the street and saw someone ripping down anything, not just a poster, if I saw someone ripping and damaging property, I’ll just be like, you’re not a nice person,” she says. “That’s just a mean thing to do. So instead of ignoring it and allowing people to almost cyberbully me, I’m going to acknowledge it and be like, yeah, I have seen this. And it makes me feel really sad. I put a lot of money and effort into that and it’s not OK. And I feel glad that my fans can at least humanize me in that way because I think the standard thing you always get told in PR is don’t say anything, ignore it. But I’m like, I think that makes me feel disconnected from my fans. Maybe when I get bigger, I’ll change my mind when I say this, but I just enjoy having an actual online friendship with my fans and them knowing that they can see me in public and be like, hey, I love those sorts of things.”
Chinouriri has come face-to-face with her fans over the past few years as she’s tirelessly traipsed the globe. She opened for Sabrina Carpenter’s U.K. and European “Short n’ Sweet” tour and Florence + the Machine’s “Everybody Scream” tour this past spring, and headlined her own trek amid performances at Governor’s Ball and Bonnaroo. In late August, she was the sole British act to perform at Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Festival in Irvine, California, handpicked by Rodrigo for what she describes as a “perfect day.” Next, she’ll open for Gracie Abrams on her tour in December.
For now, Chinouriri has her fans front of mind as she counts down the days towards the release of “I Think I Spoke Too Soon” and how the record’s message will land. “My fans have grown up, I’ve grown up with my fans quite a bit and I would love my fans to recognize my evolution but maybe [also] their own evolution,” she says. “I hope that if they are having a tough time, [that they] learn to be self-forgiving. Self-forgiveness is one of the biggest things I’ve learned through this album. I have done and said and been so many versions of myself in the past that I hate and someone will perceive me that way for the rest of my life. It used to give me anxiety, but now I’m like, you know what? I forgive myself because I know I’m not that person. That is something that is not normalized anymore in society. I hope my fans who listen to it can recognize that in themselves and then pass that same level of grace onto other people.”