‘Loads of pop stars don’t drink’: Rachel Chinouriri on alcohol, Adele, and making album two

'Loads of pop stars don't drink': Rachel Chinouriri on alcohol, Adele, and making album twoMusic

Rachel Chinouriri is moving faster than people can pigeonhole her. On a pop-focused album two, she explores her party girl persona — and everything that was hiding beneath it

Rachel Chinouriri realised her life had changed on a flight to Dublin. She had just left the Brit Awards in London and was heading to support Sabrina Carpenter on the European leg of her 2025 Short and Sweet tour. She might have been sitting in economy, but she knew that within a couple of hours she would be prancing around in front of 13,000 people wearing the plunging, hooded jumpsuit — Kylie Minogue eat your heart out — sitting in her suitcase. Not many other Ryanair customers can claim that. “I just kind of sat and went, ‘F***, what is my life?’” the 27-year-old singer remembers as we sip coffee in a dinky Kentish Town café, unnoticed by the laptop users around us.

Journalists, label execs or fans would have probably made a different guess for Chinouriri’s “F***, what is my life?” moment. Her recent appearance on SNL UK, perhaps. Or her selection as the only English act to feature on the billing of Olivia Rodrigo’s landmark Daisy Chain Fields festival this summer — alongside an impressive all-female line-up that included Doechii, Chappell Roan and Stevie Nicks. Or when Oscar-nominated actor Florence Pugh made a cameo in the music video for her 2024 single Never Need Me, prompting the song to go viral. Or, or, or. The list goes on.

If we’re being accurate, the thing that actually changed Chinouriri’s life was What a Devastating Turn of Events, a debut album that had quite the opposite effect of its title. It was an out-and-out indie-pop LP, peppered with the kind of guitars and drums Chinouriri had grown up hearing on YouTube-to-MP3 rips of songs by her favourite singers and bands: Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Blur, The Libertines. She fangirls at the mention of Coldplay and talks proudly about meeting the band’s drummer (Will Champion, whom most of the British public couldn’t name, let alone recognise on sight) backstage at Glastonbury in 2025. “Everyone was like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ And I was just like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the drummer from Coldplay,’ and I ran up to him,” she says. “He was so nice, I flipped my shit when he walked away.”

Yana Van NuffelAs much as indie music runs through her core, Chinouriri was also using her debut album to make a point. For years the music and media industries had tried to pigeonhole her as a soul or R&B singer. Her work is, and has never been, anything of the sort, but she’s a black woman in music, and so this is the genre that the Powers That Be deemed her fit to produce. “I’ve worked hard to push that I’m indie,” Chinouriri says of her debut. “But there’s also an ability to pigeonhole yourself when you’re trying to prove something.”

Never one to be put in a box, she’s changing tack once again with album two, I Think I Spoke Too Soon, which is capital P pop music. There’s still indie nestled in its midst — including on standout tracks AAAHHH!!! and I’m a Star — but the majority of the album is sonically closer to Ariana Grande than Arctic Monkeys. One Song Away From Crying, the album’s opener and lead single, sets the tone. Disco guitar dances alongside heartbeat drums, yet something melancholy lingers in the space between them. “Mirror wall, disco ball, I’ve never looked better and I’ve never felt worse,” Chinouriri sings. I Think I Spoke Too Soon tells the story of a night out from start to finish. From the beginning, it’s clear she isn’t sure if she actually wants to be there. Not there, on that dancefloor, not there, drinking that drink, but equally not there, calling time on the night when she knows she should. This internal conflict crescendos with Broken Chair, a nursery rhyme-esque take on an addiction spiral, co-written with Lucy Dacus. In the song, Chinouriri finds kinship with a discarded chair on the street that she sees while stumbling home. It may not be the album’s final track, but it certainly feels like some kind of rock bottom.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chinouriri is sober now and has been for over a year. Her sobriety was prompted by experiences since the release of her first album, which in turn provided material for album two. “I blacked out three times,” she recalls. “The first time I woke up the next day genuinely like, ‘Oh, what happened yesterday?’” It was an industry party, which left Chinouriri worried about who had seen her and what she had said. The next time she woke up after blacking out, she was told she had met a fan. “Luckily the fan told me I was being really lovely, but I don’t want that; I want to be engaged, I want to know what I’m doing,” she says. “And then the third time I was like, ‘Nah, this is done.’”

The album artwork for I Think I Spoke Too SoonYana Van NuffelHaving only started drinking at 22, it was a love that burned bright and fast. Chinouriri grew up in a strict Zimbabwean household where it was a mission to smuggle in pop music, let alone booze. “There was no alcohol allowed in the house,” she says. “So it’s not like I could go through these things and go to my parents, ‘Oh I’ve just had a drink and I feel horrible,’ because instead of a supportive response I’d get, ‘Why are you drinking? You shouldn’t be drinking!’”

Chinouriri is the first in her family to have been born in Britain. Her parents were child soldiers in Zimbabwe’s war for independence, then moved to the UK in 1997. Things weren’t easy once they had settled in Croydon, either: her father, Simba, struggles with debilitating epilepsy and her mother, Melody, once had to work four jobs to keep the family afloat. The pair were thrilled when they found out their youngest daughter was considering becoming a police detective. Unbeknownst to them, she had also applied to the BRIT School — and got in. “I mean, if you move country in 1997, give birth to a child in 1998, work your ass off, have four jobs at a time… Dad’s sick. Sacrifice everything you have to get me here, live in a little suburb in a nice safe area. And then at 16, I go, ‘I’m going to go and sing, dance, and act.’ It’s kind of crazy,” she laughs, swishing her hip-length black hair behind her shoulder.

“I know it comes from a place of security. She wants me to be stable, and no one in my family is in the music industry, so she’s just like, ‘How do you make money from these things unless you’re literally Beyoncé? And let me tell you, I could not sing like Beyoncé.” When Chinouriri showed her parents So My Darling, one of her earliest releases and now a classic among her fans, who call themselves Darlings, the response was mainly confusion. “Zimbabweans, we like to dance,” she says, “so then hearing sad songs, my family was like ‘Where is the beat? Where is the dancing?’ And I was like, ‘No, guys, it’s like… songwriting,’” she blushes.

Still, the Chinouriris let their daughter carve her own path, even if they couldn’t see a future in it. Then, in the pandemic, Chinouriri went viral. “Melody understands Facebook,” she laughs. Melody also understood when people she knew in real life started talking about her daughter’s burgeoning success. And Melody understood when her daughter was booked for her first real tour. “Then she’s like, oh, you’re no longer travelling on the train to the middle of nowhere, earning zero money for whole days of work. It was like, ‘Oh, okay, yeah, I get what this is now, and I can see how we can earn money from it.’”

Somewhere in the middle of this journey — after BRIT School, before virality — Chinouriri had her first drink. A shot of Wray & Nephew rum on her 22nd birthday. It went down easily. Not physically (when does straight Wray & Nephew ever?), but spiritually, and Chinouriri slipped into her newfound party girl persona with relish. “And then I f***ed it,” she deadpans. Luckily for her, it’s a lot more common to be young and sober in the music industry now than it was 20 years ago.

Rachel Chinouriri performing at Daisy Chain Fields festival in August 2026Getty Images“I was hanging out with Lola Young and when I’d be like ‘I’m not gonna drink,’ she’d be like ‘Well I’m not gonna drink either,’” she remembers. PinkPantheress was similarly supportive, as was Florence Welch, whom Chinouriri supported on tour earlier this year and who has been sober for the past 12 years. “She was telling me it was great for her career.”

As someone with such an enviable trajectory, Welch’s advice was huge. Then suddenly it all became clear. “There’s actually loads of people [in pop] who don’t drink; you just don’t know,” she says. “You can have a crazy schedule and actually make all these parties and things, and the reason you can make them is that you’re not drinking.” It was a major realisation. “I was like, ‘It makes so much more sense now. This is how you’re all doing it. You’re not drinking, you’re just holding a flute of non-alcoholic prosecco.’”

Life has been a lot easier since Chinouriri quit drinking. She made fun of her boyfriend Isaac (whose name you may recognise from the loved-up singalong track on her first album, Can We Talk About Isaac?) recently for having a monster of a hangover — “I was like ‘God, I don’t envy you,’” — and thanks her lucky stars every day she wakes up not feeling sick and unhappy. Granted, health isn’t always guaranteed: you wouldn’t have known it, but Chinouriri was fighting off a serious case of bronchitis during both her SNL and Daisy Chain Fields performances — two of the biggest days of her career thus far. “[On SNL] I couldn’t hit so many notes; I wasn’t singing in the tone I wanted to, or that I usually sing in. But I was still having fun. And if people go, ‘Oh, she didn’t sound the best.’ Well I quite literally did not have a voice earlier that day.”

Luckily, there was one recent life-changing moment that she managed to sneak in before the bronchitis hit: performing for Adele. “She came to my LA show,” Chinouriri grins. It was a “mission” behind the scenes, she says, especially choosing where to seat her to cause the least commotion. But Adele, the 16-time Grammy Award winner and best-selling female UK artist of the 21st century, chose her own seat: in plain sight, right next to the bar. “I was like ‘Are you sure? Is she sure?’” Chinouriri recalls, “but she’s Adele, so she’s sure.” Luckily the whole event went off without a hitch — even though the pair still haven’t had the chance to meet face to face. But that’s okay. If one thing’s for sure when it comes to Rachel Chinouriri — there’s still plenty of “F***, what is my life?” moments left to come.