Rachel Chinouriri Gets Sober and Confessional on New Album

Rachel Chinouriri releases her sophomore album, "I Think I Spoke Too Soon," today — a concept record built around one blurry night out and the sobriety that followed it. The 27-year-old British singer-songwriter, whose 2024 debut "What a Devastating Turn of Events" made global waves, told Variety the record forced a reckoning: "It was like doing an autopsy of myself whilst going through it at the same time."

She reverse-engineered the whole project. Chinouriri took a large piece of paper, wrote down the themes and experiences that shaped her recent years, and worked outward from there. "We had a bunch of song titles, but no songs," she said over Zoom, days before release. "I saw a picture, but I had blurry vision. I was wearing glasses with the wrong prescription."

The blur became the concept.

What changed between the two albums?

The thrashing guitars of "Events" are largely gone, replaced by synth-powered fare. The first song she wrote, "The Good Fight," set the thesis: a dreamy, percussive track 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 asks on it.

Writing that song made her realize she needed to go sober. "Broken Chair," the album's jaunty centerpiece, looks back at how bad things got after last call: "She's throwin' up into a gutter, it's getting really hard to love her."

She's blunt about the self-examination. "[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 said. "The amount of times I've sat on the floor throwing up in the streets London… Thank God there's no recordings of me. It made me feel almost a bit sad for myself."

Why does a sad album sound like a party?

Chinouriri cites Madonna and Donna Summer as inspirations for the record's musical levity — a crying-in-the-club juxtaposition. Lead single "One Song Away From Crying" is an '80s synth bop that shimmers like light off a disco ball while she sings, "I've never looked better and I've never felt worse."

The contrast is family inheritance, she explained. "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," she said. "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."

How does she handle her fans — and her trolls?

Chinouriri treats her fan base as peers, not punters. She once ran a Coldplay fan account on Twitter, and she refuses the standard PR playbook of silence. Earlier this month, she publicly called out an X user who posted a video ripping down one of her posters because it sat next to one promoting Adéla.

"If I saw someone ripping and damaging property, I'll just be like, you're not a nice person," she said. "I put a lot of money and effort into that and it's not OK. I just enjoy having an actual online friendship with my fans."

The touring calendar explains the fan bond. This past spring she opened for Sabrina Carpenter's U.K. and European "Short n' Sweet" tour and Florence + the Machine's "Everybody Scream" tour, while headlining her own dates around sets at Governor's Ball and Bonnaroo. In late August she was the sole British act at Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields Festival in Irvine, California — handpicked by Rodrigo for what she calls a "perfect day."

Next, she opens for Gracie Abrams in December.

The album's real message, she said, is self-forgiveness. "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," she said. "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." She hopes listeners pass that same grace on to others — a modest demand from an artist who just performed her own autopsy on record.