Chxrry Was Always the Main Character
Toronto-born alt-R&B star and XO Records signee Chxrry gears up for centre stage after warming up and winning over crowds on her European support run.
Chxrry in 2026. Image property of Oliver Payne.
It's the kind of January morning that has you shedding layers the moment you step foot indoors. Except Chxrry, the 29-year-old alt-R&B breakout from Toronto, looks unfazed. She's still bundled up in a Norma Kamali hoodie and fur coat that suggests London is no match for the Canadian cold. But four hours in, clutching a coffee, she's already decided: "London's nice."
The year has just started and Chxrry is wasting no time. As the first female signee to The Weeknd's XO Records, she's entered 2026 at speed: touring Europe, supporting singer-songwriter Mariah the Scientist, lining up a new single in February after viral releases like "Groupie" and "Main Character" and adjusting quickly to the expectations that follow.
Those expectations crystallised with the success of "Main Character", a glossy, trap-leaning, atmospheric anthem that feels equally at home in a stadium or a strip club. Looking out over the city rush, she adds that the single picked up extra hype when Kylie Jenner posted a video using the sound. "I was screaming after I made ['Main Character']. Then it came out and it did what I knew it would do." There's also the small matter of having the music video directed by fashion's favourite disruptor, Mowalola, in her directorial debut.
Starting the year on the road makes it clear she's not easing in. "I love it. It's definitely draining but I'm a fun person so I make everything fun," she says. Still, opening for friends, like UK girl group FLO or The Weeknd and now Mariah, makes touring that much more bearable. The added incentive? "There's always someone to hang out with. Doing that by myself, I'd probably be like, 'I'm so over this. I'm bored.'"
Opening a show often means performing to a crowd already half-checked out. Not if Chxrry's on the bill. Videos from her performances have been circulating online, showing brazen mic stand slams, a hair-whipping floor show and a sustained, show-stopping note during her 'revamped' take of fan-fave "Favorite Girl".
With the overwhelming response that has garnered, she's acutely aware of the responsibility she holds as an opener, both to the artist but more so, the virtual and real audiences: "They expect me to come out swinging and now I've created this fucking insane standard… I have to continue."
“They expect me to come out swinging and now I’ve created this fucking insane standard… I have to continue.”
This time around, she's determined to make the tour feel different to those before, even if some decisions came down to the wire. "The looks were completely last-minute," she admits. "We went to the stripper store and they happened to have these one-of-one custom bodysuits. We bought seven of them, took them to the tailor and had them tailored to my body." But the deliberate marker of Chxrry's tour look is her now-signature mesh eye masks. She lights up at my mere mention of them.
Chxxry in one of her signature mesh eye masks. Image property of Oliver Payne.
"The masks were actually the most effort I put into my look and I'm so happy you're asking about this because it needs to be said in an interview. There is a lot of debate online that it's a makeup look that I got from this and that. It is not makeup," Chxrry says emphatically, as if her moment to set the record straight has finally arrived.
The masks in question are delicate, narrow rectangles of mesh, sometimes tuile, that just barely obscure the eyes. Though she is quick to reiterate it isn't a form of makeupped magic, they're attached to the temples of her face with a nearly indistinct amount of eyelash glue. "I have every colour," she beams.
It makes sense that she's precious over it. David Bowie claimed the glamrock lightning bolt face paint for Aladdin Sane and a glowing astral sphere marked on the forehead that signalled the Ziggy Stardust persona. Grace Jones donned graphic ochre eyelids in the artwork for Bulletproof Heart, while Solange later leaned into poppy, bright, Afrofuturist uniliner a little after Sol-Angel & the Hadley St. Dreams released.
However, Chxrry's mesh masquerade isn't illustrative like Bowie's or cosmetic like Solange's or Jones'—it's material. With it, she declares a new form, one that treats the face as terrain, not canvas, and as structure rather than surface.
So if Chxrry feels familiar before you've even heard her speak, it's because her image travels fast. To put it in perspective, a photoset of her was probably reblogged to death on Tumblr. Now, her tongue-in-cheek, lo-fi posts rack up numbers on Instagram and Twitter and she's most definitely a fixture on 2010s-inspired Pinterest moodboards.
Whether it's her braided side part or coiffed pink hair and noughties style, she's amused by how that gets framed. "It's so funny to me when people think it's a diss to say, 'She's inspired by the 2010s.' Like yeah, no shit. That's what I actually grew up listening to and looking at." Case in point, the opening line of "Groupie": "We can make a movie on my iPhone 4."
Her relationship with the internet, where much of her visibility was built, is much more complicated. "Yeah, I don't know if I'm very good at the internet. I'm a very unfiltered person in real life so I try to do less, especially on Twitter. They don't always get me on that app," she says. "But the internet's an amazing tool. It's the reason I'm even here, it's the reason that people know me."
Chxrry in London. Image property of Stephanie Pereira.
Particularly online, music creation and marketing have collapsed into each other in increasingly elaborate ways. You could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that albums are merely a collection of songs. Now, albums arrive as 'eras': musical monuments erected by the artist signifying tightly coded worlds of sound, style, colour and language.
The Taylor Swift formula, if followed correctly, ensures that each release introduces a new aesthetic, marking a distinct moment in the artist's career and then programming a clear and lasting association between the look, the album and a specific album in their discography. A haircut, palette or silhouette becomes shorthand for a particular moment, embedding the music into memory through image as much as sound.
“It’s so funny to me when people think it’s a diss to say, ‘She’s inspired by the 2010s.’ Like yeah, no shit. That’s what I grew up listening to and looking at.”
Ask Chxrry whether each of her albums offers her the same chance at reinvention and she doesn't hesitate: "An album definitely helps. The minute I start making a project, I start building a world sonically and visually." The instinct for total immersion came with her 2023 album, Siren, when you could say, she went 'method' with her music: "When I did Siren, I wore long black pointy nails and my hair really long. I always wore black and I made sure everything felt creepy and eerie and mysterious and sexual and sensual. I really commit."
This time around, the eagle-eyed fans will have noticed the recurring motif of electric blue in her Instagram posts, though its significance has yet to be revealed. So why the electric blue heels, nails, and of course, mesh masks? "You're asking me things that I genuinely put so much effort into and give a fuck about, I'm gonna cry! That's the colour of my album." While there have been some happy accidents in the lead-up to creating Chxrry's third album, this isn't one. "There's a reason why I picked that blue," she adds. "When you hear the album and you hear the name, it'll all tie it together."
Images property of 1uliette and Stephanie Pereira.Meeting Chxrry, the image and the reality blend into one. She is who she says she is: ardent and aspiring but not in the rigid, resolution-making sense. "I'm a pretty ambitious person. I feel like every day is like a new year," she says. She cares about her music and her audience just as much as her look and her characters. The upkeep of her universe demands full commitment and no in-betweens.
With an album on the way, "a tour, maybe some festivals and collaboration," opening up for others has opened up a world of possibilities. Until then, she loves the British accent, the fact that there has been tea "everywhere" on the UK dates and… "Oh my God, where are those cookies you gave us? Those biscuits with the chocolate?"
After rattling off every chocolate-topped treat under the sun, we land on the answer: Lu Le Petit biscuits. She likes London and, if night two at Brixton's O2 Academy was any indication, the feeling is undoubtedly mutual.
Stream "Groupie" below: