Rachel Chinouriri, a 27-year-old British-Zimbabwean artist raised in Croydon, has spent nearly a decade navigating the twin burdens of racial pigeonholing and performance anxiety to arrive at a place of hard-won self-knowledge. With her second album, she steps away from the guitar-driven indie she wielded as a statement of belonging and moves toward the synth-pop of her deeper influences — not as retreat, but as evolution. Her story sits within a longer human question about what it costs to insist on being seen whole, and what becomes possible once that insistence is no longer necessary.
Rachel Chinouriri on finding herself: 'My frontal lobe hit and I went: nah'
Chinouriri endured severe racist bullying including spitting and slurs at secondary school, with one student suspended and another excluded; she also addresses themes of self-harm and suicide in her music.