Chxrry on U, Me & My Ego and evolving her sound

Last spring, Chxrry found her sweet spot. The Toronto singer-songwriter had been working on her new album in Los Angeles, with two singles already out. Her label was planning to drop the 10-song project in the summer – all Chxrry had to do was pick the third single for the rollout. But none of the options felt right. “There was just something missing,” she tells me at The FADER offices in early May. “I haven’t told [the listeners] who I am.”

She went back in the studio with her producer Believve and emerged with “Main Character,” a brawny and slower-moving nocturne with muted 808s and percs thrumming beneath a woozy swirl of synths. It was strong and sexy — and clearly the right sound for Chxrry’s next album.“I was screaming,like, ‘This is gonna fuck the city up. I never know anything, but with this one? I knew.”

The song sparked something of a creative renaissance for Chxrry, who scrapped her work-in-progress and started fresh with “Main Character” as her sonic North Star. Recorded entirely at Believve’s home studio in L.A. — “less than a thousand square feet, me on a chair, him by the computer, every day just going back and forth” — U, Me & My Ego, arriving May 29, blends sultry ‘80s synthpop with the stadium-ready melodies of rage rappers like Travis Scott and Trippie Redd. It’s a huge leap from Chxrry’s 2023 EP Siren, which showcased the rising singer’s vocal chops but didn’t feel totally distinct from her R&B competitors. From the lush ambience of “Groupie” to the insistent kick drum propelling “Hall of Fame” forward, Believve’s production here covers a startling breadth of ground without sacrificing sonic cohesion. Chxrry tells me the pair recorded hundreds of songs before paring it back to the 10 tracks on the record.

“We picked the best of each sound we wanted to explore. What's the best pop song? What's the most amazing ballad we've written? And then storytelling and identity: what’s gonna be the most me? Albums serve different purposes, so I wanted this album to strictly be about identity. Who am I? Let me tell them who I am.”

Chxrry was born Lydia Habtemariam to Ethiopian immigrants in Scarborough, on Toronto’s East End. “There is no vibe babe; I am the vibe,” she responds wryly when I ask what it was like growing up in the “very quiet” district. Her parents’ love language was music, she says, and there are traces of the Arabic musical scale used by Ethiopian musicians in her melodic choices to this day. But despite being raised by music-lovers, and in the same neighborhood as her future-labelhead Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, a career in the industry wasn’t really part of the plan.

She briefly attended York University as an undecided major before dropping out. Then in 2018, a friend recorded her singing “Work” by Rihanna and Chxrry went viral on Instagram. That led to a label deal with XO Records, which hasn’t been shy about promoting their first female signee: most artists would kill to open for The Weeknd on tour, as Chxrry did in 2024. When it comes to her music, Chxrry says the label has been “extremely supportive” and “lenient” when it comes to her development and self-discovery as an artist.

That includes supporting her decision to ditch her last album and instead chase the sound of U, Me & My Ego over the past six months with Believve, who was behind the boards on “Water” by Tyla as well as songs by Usher, LISA, and Shenseea. Chxrry says the Birmingham, U.K. producer’s faith in her as an artist helped galvanize her confidence on the new record.

“When I met Believve, he immediately was like, You’re a star. You have the biggest personality I’ve ever met. You are just unhinged and insane, you’re everything.,” she says of their partnership. “I think the magic is that me and Believve wrote and produced [“Main Character”] together in his den in L.A. with a broken mic and no headphones. He is somebody who’s encouraged me to fully lean into who I am and encouraged me to express and try all the things I want to try.”

That included exploring “non-traditional sounds” for women on U, Me & My Ego, which sees Chxrry bursting out the gate with the hard-knocking “Blockstar” and incorporating more audacious sounds and ideas.

Take the sidechick smackdown saga of “CALL SECURITY,” where Chxrry gets into a catfight with her lover’s paramour, or the “polarizing” metronomic chirp on Mariah The Scientist collab “Bottles & Lights,” which might prompt you to check your smoke alarm. Across the album’s 10 songs, listeners are never far from having their expectations flipped: “I want them to be like, what the fuck did she just say? What did I just hear?” Cherry laughs. She still delivers more straightforward slow jams (“Boring”) and club tracks (“Badness” might be a Top 5 Cash Cobain song Ever), but U, Me & My Ego overwhelmingly sidesteps sonic and lyrical cliche.

“I've always prioritized songwriting. It's really hard for me to sing something that somebody else wrote; the most I ever did it was with Siren,” says Chxrry. “It's probably why it's like my least favorite project, because it sounds like a clusterfuck of different ideas. All very me, but [U, Me & My Ego] is the most honest body of work I've had. I was like, I’m gonna say the thing.”

On the album, Chxrry writes about love and relationships with an inner strength and dignity that neuters any pick-me allegations from the jump. She’s more interested in the emotions and actions her lovers elicit from her than the men themselves. That allows for her romantic and lovelorn tunes to feel personal and lived-in without relying too heavily on concrete details; instead, their specificity comes from Chxrry’s inner monologue, whether she’s feeling bossy or bashful. On album highlight “BIBLE,” love drives our heroine to idiocy and blasphemy: God could say you’re not the one, if you text me I’ll still come, the way I / feel for youuuuu.

“With this project, I was really intent on showing range,” she says. “It’s a lost art, and it’s not the artists’ fault; people just want one thing. They don’t let artists blossom, and it’s a constant thing of ‘well, who are you?’ And it’s like, ‘I’m figuring it out as you are, the fuck?’”

The title of U, Me & My Ego bridges the album’s three main topics, she says “When I was done writing the songs and breaking everything down, they were either about ‘you,’ a guy, or ‘me,’ Lydia, or ego, which is just Chxrry. And I have a really big ego: I think I’m just the best bitch on earth. Person on earth, to be honest,” she adds. “I wanted to show that there’s no shame in having a big ego, and I wanted to romanticize it because it’s so taboo.”