A storm warning can’t keep Rachel Chinouriri or her fans down during her Sunday-afternoon set at Gov Ball 2026 in Queens. She isn’t a headliner (yet), but there are plenty of young fans who are here to see her specifically.
“It’s fun being able to see Black girls get to be rock stars and pop stars and not being put into one little box of what’s acceptable,” says a 20-something fan named Alexis, decked out in a pink tank top with a guitar graphic across it. “I think it’s important for us to see that Black girls can be anything.”
Fans like Alexis aren’t here just to see Chinouriri, though; a flock of stylish teens and 20-somethings ran across Flushing Meadows Corona Park to see her set after catching Hannah Jadagu, a 24-year-old bedroom pop artist known for her fuzzy guitar-laden songs. Others in Chinouriri’s crowd had come even earlier in the day to catch Hemlocke Springs, the 27-year-old rising new-wave artist who has opened for Chappell Roan and MUNA. Earlier in the weekend, many fans caught Flowerovlove, the 21-year-old UK electro-pop star, and 27-year-old alt singer Ravyn Lenae.
Every one of these young, Black women artists have defied the confines of the type of music a young, Black female artist is expected to make.
But not without hurdles. In 2022, Chinouriri wrote an open letter, which she shared on her social media platforms, about the mislabeling and racist critiques thrown her way as she started to come up in the industry: “When I was 18 I started putting pictures of myself to my music artwork, and sometimes I regret ever doing that,” she wrote then. “Before then it was always ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ or even ‘electronic.’ Then it became… ‘You sound like a white girl’… ‘I can hear influences of soul’… ‘This is kind of RnB’… ‘Neo soul?’… ‘This is white music’… No, I am just black and you see my colour before you hear my music.”
In spite of the fact that nearly all forms of popular music are rooted in Black culture, modern Black artists still struggle with being accepted when they step outside the world’s designated-genre confines of R&B, soul, and hip-hop. Even the actual genres are rooted in segregation, with the label “R&B” being assigned to Black rock-and-roll artists who were deemed unmarketable to white audiences—even if their white peers were performing similar or the same songs, as exemplified by Big Mama Thornton’s original recording of “Hound Dog” being popularized by Elvis years later.
The whitewashing and miscategorization of their music hasn’t stopped numerous young Black women from stepping up and out of the boxes in which they were unsuccessfully confined. Everywhere from the underground to the Top 40 is full of Black women who sling guitars, write emotionally penetrating lyrics, and pull off synth and electronic experimentations. For every one of them, there are millions of young girls watching them break down those barriers and feeling like they belong too.
Hemlocke Springs considers Chinouriri “such an advocate” in this space for artists like them, something she appreciates more and more as her career grows. After Hemlocke’s own synth-pop dreamscape “Girlfriend” went viral on TikTok in 2022, she encountered many of the same comments Chinouriri did. “That’s definitely a part of just doing this job that I anticipated, [but] maybe not to the extent I feel like I sometimes get in terms of my own music,” she tells Teen Vogue a couple days before Gov Ball. “I’m doing the music that I enjoy, but I know there will be automatic discourse because I’m a Black woman.”
It’s not just the anonymous commenters and uninformed critics who have made Black artists feel unwelcome for stepping into genres that may feel more “white.” The dissonance is deep in the industry, where young women like those on the Gov Ball festival lineup, and well beyond, have been treated as niche acts and given fewer resources than other artists on their labels.
Flowerovlove notes conversations she’s had with other Black female artists with whom she’s found community over the years: “I didn’t even know that I needed those kinds of friendships until I had a dinner with some people,” she recalls, choosing to keep the guest list private. “It was like, ‘Oh my God, this shit happens to you too?’ It’s such a niche thing that speaking about it to your friends who aren’t in music doesn’t hit the same.”
The dinner guests spoke about “the division between POC artists and other artists” at their labels. “To be honest, it shows up in very little ways that only someone who is a person of color would notice,” she explains. “It’s a racial thing. It’s a stereotyping thing. It’s a boxing thing.”
For all of these artists, their sound is a reflection of the music that they felt drawn to as they began to form their own taste. Chinouriri, for example, remembers a childhood spent watching Channel U in London. “It was mainly Beyoncé, Destiny’s Child videos, which I loved, then I discovered Daughter,” she says of how the atmospheric band became a pivotal influence on her own indie-pop sound. Later, she fell in love with Coldplay, Labrinth, and Florence + the Machine, the last of whom she recently supported on their Everybody Scream tour.
While attending the British Recording Industry Trust, more commonly known as the BRIT School, Chinouriri slowly found herself drawn to indie and alt rock in her own songwriting and production. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is something I’m very, very interested in.’ I just started hearing certain sounds and learning how to produce them when I was in school.” Later this summer, she’ll perform alongside artists including Bikini Kill, Stevie Nicks, Chappell Roan, Katseye, and more at Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields music festival.
Hemlocke Springs, meanwhile, has long found herself drawn to the ’80s: Kate Bush, Tears for Fears, Prince. “I gotta get out of that decade,” she says jokingly. “But it’s a good decade.”
Flowerovlove was a Belieber and a Directioner who now makes music that reflects the youthful, bubblegum bliss of those artists she still loves so much. She hasn’t encountered many people mislabeling her sound as anything but pop, but she does note the differences she’s experienced in America in contrast to the UK, where she grew up. “I feel like Americans are, let me say, woke, and understand the history of America and Black history from here,” she says.
“People understand what you’re doing is a movement,” she continues, “and it’s history in the making because it’s something they wanted to grow up seeing. Growing up in the UK, things always felt so far away from us, and you grow up being told what to like. [US fans] really care about what Black artists are doing.”
The fans on the ground at Gov Ball prove that. In 2023, Nadira Foster-Williams began playing Hannah Jadagu on her WFMU show, where she DJs under the name Naomi Shambles. “I just found her randomly [while] digging through digital archives,” she recalls. “It’s so important that she is recognized right now and seen for all her beauty and all her glory. She’s the soul of alternative Black women.”
A fan decked out in blue—per Hemlocke’s request that her fans wear the color to the show this weekend—shows off a homemade friendship bracelet with “Hemlocke Springs” spelled out in beads. “I just love her creativity,” the fan gushes. “It’s rare to see a Black girl be so alternative. I love her style so much and her mystical energy.”
In the crowds, there is a clear revolution building: Black women are breaking out of every expectation of who they should be or what they should like based on the color of their skin. But even as the artists those fans love and look up to stand before a sea of supporters at their early festival sets and in consistently growing tour venues, they continue to fight the voice in their head that tells them they may not belong.
“I’ve received a lot of praise, which is very nice and feels quite comforting, but it also gets difficult because a lot of people don’t understand,” says Flowerovlove. “If I did make R&B music, I’m sure I’d be a significantly bigger artist by now because it’s comfortable for people; it’s familiar.”
No matter what people say or the limitations these Black women may feel compared with their white peers, each of these artists feels affirmed in their choices. At the end of the day, all that matters is that they are making music they love to make—and reflecting their own taste. And, clearly, many people are connecting to it. “No matter what the discourse is like, as long as I enjoy what I am doing, that is ultimately what matters,” says Hemlocke.
At the core, each one of these artists is doing exactly what every artist should be doing: speaking from the heart through their music in a way that enough fans can see themselves reflected through them, no matter what they look like.
“I’m a deeply emotional person, but not in a crying-all-the-time way,” Chinouriri explains of her approach to making music. “I had a lot of challenges when I was a teenager becoming an adult, and I feel like with a lot of those challenges, when I was able to write about them, I could maybe understand them more when I wrote them as a song.”
It also helps her listeners understand their own challenges more. “I feel like the representation that we’re supposed to have isn’t really there,” says a fan who came to see Chinouriri, who’s been listening to her music since 2023.
Fortunately for that fan, though, and the many others who bought tickets to Gov Ball and seemingly countless tours, Chinouriri, Flowerovlove, Hemlocke Springs and other Black women are making names for themselves in a space that hasn’t always welcomed them. They are not only carving out space for themselves, but for so many of the fans who are looking for their own ways to belong. The space can only grow from here. As the same fan puts it, “She’s for us.”
Photographer: Chinazam Ojukwu
Writer: Brittany Spanos
DOP: Reese Fleming
First assistant: Christopher Morel
Second assistant: Julia Safrin
Photographer's producer: Nicolas Padron
Retoucher: Alberto Maro
Stylist: Crystal Okonkwo
Hair: Jordan Kamara
Makeup: Yuui Vision
Producer: Greg Birkhofer
Creative editorial director: Mi-Anne Chan
Digital director: Alyssa Hardy
Global fashion director: Tchesmeni Leonard
Entertainment director: Eugene Shevertalov
Programming & creative development director: Amalie MacGowan
Senior editor: P. Claire Dodson
Senior designer: Liz Coulbourn
Senior manager, social media: Jillian Selzer
Copy editor: Dawn Rebecky
Beauty editor: Donya Momenian
Associate fashion editor: Samantha Gasmer
Assistant fashion editor: Crystal Okonkwo
