CHINCHILLA completes trilogy ahead of European tour.

CHINCHILLA is a London-based singer-songwriter. Her 2023 single “Little Girl Gone” became a viral TikTok hit that took her straight to the top of Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart, racking up over 190 million streams, and was featured on the soundtrack of Netflix’s Hostage. This summer she has released a trilogy of songs that see her taking a more confessional direction.

“The word I keep coming back to is honest,” she says. “It's the most honest music I've ever made, and I felt it really came from raw heartbreak. What comes with that is emotional chaos and turmoil, and it never feels like one emotion. When you’re going through a lot emotionally, it feels like one minute you’re sad and the next minute you’re empowered and the next minute you’re angry – it’s like different stages of grief.” The story of this personal journey through heartbreak began with “Avoidance”, released in June, and reaches its conclusion today with her latest single, “To Have & Hold”.

““To Have & Hold” is my liberation song. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a song more after I’ve written it than this one. That chorus has something in it that is so addictive. Maybe it’s the way it makes me feel, the freedom in the lyrics and the big freeing vocal in the chorus. Maybe it’s the transitional time in my life that I wrote it. It makes me feel like I’m flying. This trilogy of songs has been so honest, so specific in the lyrics, I love how this song says it so plainly, ‘love don’t mean control’ - a simple statement, it’s all that needs saying, unarguable. To end the trilogy on this one feels hopeful and joyous. A celebration of strength and self love and hope for the future. I’m also obsessed with the sexy verses and guitar licks - could listen to them for houuuuurs!”

The middle song of the trilogy, “Ok As I Am”, co-written with Eva Busacker Arnby and producer Nicolas Rebscher, felt special from the start. “I went in and Eva started playing the piano part, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this.’ It immediately put me in a mood and a space, and then I started writing the verse. Hearing this aggressive pre-chorus, I was like, maybe it needs to go somewhere really different; a beat comes in and it’s like, ‘I had to learn to love / The prisoner you fucking hated (uh-huh)’.” Only recently, listening back to her initial voice note of the writing session, did she realize where the inspiration for that “uh-huh” came from. “I was really obsessed with James Brown at that time. I kept bringing that to sessions – I was like, ‘Can we just write something James Brown-y?’ And now I don't think of it at all, I don't hear the James Brown in it, but I get where my head was.”

The voice note also documents her working method with her songwriting partners. “I don’t know the names of the chords, so I’m always like, ‘Can you play de-de-de da, de-de – what’s that chord?’ Then it’s like, ‘This one?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that one!’”. As she describes how the “angry, fuck you vibe” of the pre-chorus resolves into the refrain of “Help me understand / I’m OK as I am”, it’s clear that her enthusiasm for the song is undimmed by weeks of promotional activity. “Oh my God, I’m really obsessed with this song! It’s a weird one because it hasn’t aged for me – like, usually I get bored of a single when I’ve been talking about it for ages. But this one I could talk about for ages.”

“For an artist who is really creative and has a real vision and aesthetic, I think it is important, and people love to see it. That’s how icons are made”

— Chinchilla

“Ok As I Am” is accompanied by an ambitious video that she was so determined to make that she funded it herself. “The honest truth behind that is there was no budget for a video: it was either I don't do it or I self-fund it. I had this idea. I was obsessed with the song, I was obsessed with this idea, and I was like, ‘I really want to make this video. If I don’t, it’s like admitting defeat. I have to do this.’” Directed by fashion photographer Kai Cem Narin, the four-minute film weaves a surreal dreamscape around the line “Sorry that while you were sleeping in bed / I was laid next to you crying and texting my mum instead”. “I’m so proud of the video. It was a lot of energy, a lot of money and a lot of hard work; a lot of favours were pulled. It was probably the most enjoyable process I’ve ever had in a video. I felt really listened to, really respected.” The advantage of making a self-funded video is total artistic control. “No one was trying to take conversations away from me or hide parts of it from me. No one was belittling. Sometimes people can be patronizing to an artist without meaning to – they’re like, ‘You don’t know this? This is how it works,’ and you’re like, ‘I do know this, this is my video and we’re doing it like this.’ I had the best team on it, and I just felt really respected the whole time, and everyone was up for it. Everyone dug in and was like, ‘We’re going to make it happen.’ It was amazing.”

She’s tactful about her label, Island’s reluctance to put up money for videos. “When you think about it in terms of a purely business decision and quick profit, I understand why that's not the thing they want to do the most.” But she would also argue that the broader creative work of a musician is vital to their appeal. “There has to be a history of the art, and if you’re not building that then what are you doing? For an artist who is really creative and has a real vision and aesthetic, I think it is important, and people love to see it. That's how icons are made. I understand it's a risk, the cost, so I think the impulse is to make loads of short-form content – but then you’re labelled as a TikTok artist.”

Aware that CHINCHILLA’s own big break came via social media, she’s ambivalent about its centrality to the music industry. “I hate that it's needed, but it doesn't mean I don't enjoy it. It can be amazing: it changed my life. I think it's the strongest marketing tool that anyone has now. I really like the way it cuts out the middleman. You can get straight to the fans.” However, it can also make it difficult to switch off. “I think I sometimes get a bit too obsessive, bogged down in how to market stuff, and it can take away from my joy of doing it for the sake of the art. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more recently, making sure I have joy in my life. I really want to go and work with monkeys. I have this calling, I'm like, ‘I need monkeys!’ I want to try and do holidays more and carve out more downtime.”

That’s unlikely to come soon, however. She’s taking her music to an international audience this autumn, having just begun a stint supporting Australian singer-songwriter G Flip on the US leg of her tour, followed by five headline gigs in Europe next month. With three well-received EPs under her belt, her thoughts are now turning to CHINCHILLA’s debut long-player. “I think the next step for me is an album. The reason I ended up doing the trilogy was because I was so torn between doing an album and doing an EP. I was like, ‘I have these three songs, I love them, it's been a while since I've released music, I really want to get them out while they still feel fresh. They're finished, so let's go! I don't want to wait.’ I mainly wanted to get stuff out because I think that's the most important thing.”

Author: Rachel Goodyear