I think I spoke too soon

Rachel Chinouriri, photographed for the announcement of her second album I think I spoke too soon

Three place names sit on the credits of Rachel Chinouriri’s second album, and one of them does not belong with the others. London and Los Angeles are where British pop records get written. Hereford is not, and part of I think I spoke too soon was made there anyway.

That is the kind of detail that only reads as a decision in hindsight. The record arrives on 16 October through Parlophone and Atlas Artists, and its architecture is stranger than a release note makes it sound. Chinouriri did not write a set of songs about her twenties. She wrote one night out, and put five years inside it.

A Night Out That Took Five Years to Write

The governing idea of the album, as Chinouriri has described it, is that the whole thing lasts one evening. Her formative years are compressed into a single night, with every version of herself from that stretch sharing the same floor at the same time. The span she documents runs from twenty-two to twenty-seven, which in her case takes in the writing and release of a debut album and everything that followed it.

It is a structural choice before it is a thematic one, and it does a job that a chronological record cannot. A night out has a shape: the arrival, the stretch where everything is working, the hour where the room tips, the decision about when to leave. Threading half a decade through that shape gives a writer somewhere to put material that would otherwise sit as separate songs about separate years, each one arriving with its own explanation. Here the explanation is the setting.

Chinouriri has said the record takes in her sobriety, the transformation of her inner and outer worlds, femininity and relationships, and that the idea underneath all of it works as a kind of permission slip: that a person can change who they are at any moment, and forgive themselves at any moment. Forgiveness, in her framing, is the step that comes first. Everything else follows from it.

Why the Same Four Names Kept Coming Back

Four of the people on the credits are described as longtime collaborators: APOB, Mary Weitz, Glen Roberts and Daniel Hylton-Nuamah. On a major-label second album, that much continuity is worth noticing. The usual pressure after a debut that performs is to widen the room: to bring in writers with recent hits attached, to book sessions with people whose names do useful work on a credit sheet.

Keeping a settled writing room does something different. It removes the first two days of every session, the part where everybody establishes what the artist will and will not do, and it means a bad idea can be called a bad idea without anyone losing face. Records made this way tend to sound less negotiated. Whether that is what happened here is something the album will answer in October, but the personnel decision was made long before the release date was.

The Two New Voices in the Room

Two names are credited as new: Lucy Dacus and Eli Teplin. Adding a small number of outside writers to an established group is a narrower move than reopening the room entirely, and it is a common way to keep a second album from repeating the first without dismantling what made the first work.

It also changes the arithmetic of a session. A settled team knows the artist’s instincts well enough to protect them; a new writer has no reason to protect anything and will suggest the thing nobody in the room would have said out loud. Two of those against four people who know the catalogue is a deliberate ratio, not an accident of scheduling.

Three Cities on One Set of Credits

The writing and recording happened in London, Hereford and Los Angeles. Two of those are obvious. London is home and the industry’s centre of gravity; Los Angeles is where a British artist with an American touring calendar ends up spending session time whether or not that was the plan.

Hereford is the one that has to be chosen. Nobody drifts into recording there between other commitments, which makes it the closest thing on the credits to a stated intention: a stretch of work done somewhere with no industry to walk into afterwards and nobody dropping by. For an album built around the small hours and what a person admits to themselves in them, a location with nothing else going on is not a neutral detail. Read across all three, the geography of Rachel Chinouriri’s second album looks less like a schedule and more like a sequence of deliberate rooms.

The Single That Sits on the Edge of Leaving

The first song released from the album is “One song away from crying,” a synth-pop track with a video directed by Dora Paphides. It sets its scene on a dancefloor at the exact point where a good night stops being one.

“‘One song away from crying’ is about the precipice of a night out where you know you need to leave and have to make a decision,” Chinouriri said in the announcement. She has added that underneath the scene sits a deeper conflict with self-worth that has not yet been looked at directly.

As a lead single it is doing double duty. It works on its own terms, and it also explains the structure of the album in advance: this is a record that lives at the hour when the room is still full and one person in it has already decided to go home.

What Changed Since the Debut

Chinouriri’s first album, What a Devastating Turn of Events, came out in 2024 on Parlophone and reached the top twenty of the UK Official Charts. It brought two BRIT Award nominations, for Artist of the Year and Best New Artist, and it followed a run of releases that had already earned her an Ivor Novello nomination: the 2021 project Four° in Winter and the 2022 EP Better Off Without. An EP, Little House, came after the album.

That sequence matters to how the second record reads. This is not a debut written in private and released into silence, and it is not a rushed follow-up either. It is the album made by someone who has now watched her own songs travel, played them to rooms of people who already knew them, and had to decide what to do with the version of herself that existed before any of that happened. Putting that person on the same dancefloor as the current one is a fairly direct answer.

The Road to 16 October

The touring run around the record opened at the El Rey in Los Angeles on 26 August, with September dates in Dublin, London, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin before the album itself lands. Playing an album’s worth of unreleased material to rooms that have not heard it is its own kind of edit, and it happens here in the weeks directly before release rather than after it. Songs written for a specific hour of the night get tested in rooms the writer will only ever see once, which is a problem this desk has looked at before.

I think I spoke too soon is released on 16 October via Parlophone and Atlas Artists. Until then, the only evidence of what Rachel Chinouriri’s second album actually sounds like is one single, a set of credits and three cities that do not obviously belong on the same page.

This article was AI-assisted and edited for accuracy.