Singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri is leading the Indie Pop Renaissance

VogueUK

There’s a mighty bouquet of blush-pink roses almost wilting in Rachel Chinouriri’s house right now. “They’re kind of going off,” admits the 26-year-old musician, one of Britain’s most exciting new stars. She won’t be getting rid of them anytime soon. The occasion? A celebration of Chinouriri’s two Brit nominations. The sender? Adele.

“That was mental and incredibly unexpected,” Chinouriri recalls of the surprise delivery from her fellow Brit School alumni. Sipping a dirty chai latte in a coffee spot in Hackney Wick, the singer-songwriter – who recently created a tour journal of random items given to her by fans at shows – is notably sentimental about these things. “I need to press the good flowers that are left because I want to put them in a frame…”

Something tells me this won’t be the last extravagant bouquet she will receive from music legends. At 26, Chinouriri has achieved the modern indie pop princess fantasy: stratospheric virality with endlessly catchy tracks such as the raw “So My Darling”, a tribute to a dear friend, and pop anthem “All I Ever Asked”. Now a die-hard audience lingers on her every word and fans such Florence Pugh (or “my Flossie Pop!” as Chinouriri calls her) slide into the singer’s DMs to profess their love for her music (the singer and actor ended up with a new friendship, and Pugh a cameo in Chinouriri’s music video for “Never Need Me”). In 2024 her gut-punch debut album, What a Devastating Turn of Events, landed in the top 20 and she closed out a run of sold-out shows. Now she is in arenas supporting Sabrina Carpenter on the European leg of her Short n’ Sweet tour, to say nothing of releasing a new EP next month.

“I’m really happy with how the journey has gone,” says the south London-born star, bathed in the glow of mid-morning winter sun. “I think, when you’re 18, you are obviously like, ‘Oh, my God, I want to blow up.’ You see people your age or younger getting to those heights – which is amazing – but minus those heights, what do you want your legacy to be? Because I want to be doing this forever.” That’s not to say it’s been easy. During her rise, Chinouriri found herself pigeonholed as an “urban” artist and being introduced as “the next R&B soulstress”, despite her music being nothing of the sort. In January 2022, she published an open letter in a bid to stop being mislabelled. Has she noticed an industry change since then? “I think there’s been a realisation that Black girls can be marketed [outside of assumed Black genres], but until I see more than just me, Cat [Burns] and Olivia [Dean], then things aren’t changing. It’s a shame I had to be so loud about it.”