Rachel Chinouriri embraces her party girl past on ‘I Think I Spoke Too Soon’: “I don’t have to demonise that experience”

R achel Chinouriri is a big party girl – or at least she thought she was.

In times past, she loved going out and getting on the sauce, ignoring the cloud of anxiety that would loom over her the morning after.

“I’d go on loops of drinking from a stressed-out or traumatic place, being like, ‘This is really fun’, and then the next day being like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have done that’,” she tells NME with a smile.

Relaxed in her London flat, she leans into a teal blue couch, plants and books filling the frame behind her as she plays with her long, sleek black hair.

“I couldn’t seem to get myself out of that loop.” READ MORE: Rachel Chinouriri – ‘I Think I Spoke Too Soon’ review: a glittering comedown on the dancefloor When she began to interrogate that pattern, she realised she needed to do some soul-searching and ask herself some big questions.

Among them, what was she trying to avoid through drinking and partying – losing friends? Not being popular? “Am I scared of the person I am?” she remembers wondering.

It was that period of self-inspection that sparked the story of her second album, ‘I Think I Spoke Too Soon’, on which she untangles that party girl identity and realises what was behind it all, told through the lens of a lush night out.

The first song she wrote for the record, ‘The Good Fight’, highlights that process.

“I’m with the friends I hate, and it’s me questioning why I drink and enjoy this submersion into something which at the time I thought was cool,” Chinouriri explains.

“I’m like, ‘Actually, pull me out from this thing that I’ve sunk myself into.’” It had an impact – by the time she turned in the album’s final song, she’d been sober for more than a year.

W here her debut ‘What a Devastating Turn of Events’ catalogued her outward relationships, be it with her family, romantic partners, or the world around her, her second goes inward.

Its 12 tracks chronicle a shift in awareness and self-perception – a journey closer to who she is as an artist and as a person, the first steps of which were realising who she isn’t.

And sure, hangovers and exhausted mornings that made touring harder fuelled her desire to sober up, but so did the success of her debut album.

“There were so many [times where I was like] ‘My career and my life is so full and abundant, and it’s very busy’,” she reflects.