‘Young, Black and female in Brixton is hard’: ​from football to Top Boy and wordplay, the inspiring journey of UK rapper Cristale

Crystal Palace FC or Oxbridge beckoned, but the multitalented MC kept forging her way towards music. She explains how she poured every aspect of herself into her debut mixtape

Two weeks before we meet, UK rapper Cristale was scrambling down a cliff face to a secluded black pebbled beach in Dover, racing an incoming tide with fewer than 90 minutes to shoot the video for her single I’m Okay With Being Lonely. She’d never hiked before in her life. “I was wearing head-to-toe Stone Island, no hiking gear, full face of makeup, edges laid and Mum was doing my touch-ups on a rusty ladder,” she laughs.

As we sit in her publicist’s central London office, her hair half-braided and half-flowing past a black puffer coat, she says the rush of adrenaline hasn’t fully faded. In fact she seems to thrive on regular bumps of it: beyond her relentlessly articulate and energetic rap flow – put to work on tracks that span drill, introspective R&B and beyond – she has ably hopped between football, art, acting in Netflix projects and more.

Already with nearly half a million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, the 25-year-old has just released her debut mixtape, Clear Intentions. It’s her third attempt at a full-length project, but the first she has actually finished. “There’s no fillers, no bridges in between songs,” she says. “I’m very nitpicky with my art.”

Born and raised in Brixton, to a Guyanese father and half-Jamaican, half-Montserratian mother who doubles as her manager – “close is an understatement”, she says of their relationship – Cristale’s first taste of songwriting arrived in nursery when her uncle taught her how to rap.

Come year 7, her English teacher organised a school poetry slam, and sitting in a friend’s flat looking across at her own house, Cristale wrote What It’s Like to Be Young, a misunderstood kid’s response to the adults around her. She was victorious against older students, and while she cringes at the thought of anyone looking it up on YouTube, it gave her debut EP its title, and she sampled it on recent single H2O.

Her creative drive was matched by a competitive streak across her youth, including playing football for Crystal Palace’s academy, fuelled by boys at school telling her she couldn’t play because she was a girl. The plan was to go pro, but with exams looming she stepped away: “I couldn’t take the risk because you can go into women’s football and not make any money.” Teachers urged her towards Oxbridge, but she feared “maybe too linear” a path, and chose to follow what she loved at the time: drawing. Even if she hadn’t realised it at the time, music was where her imagination ran freest. “It never feels like a job. I’ve got a big blank canvas in front of me, like I’ve got 8,000 different paint brushes going in. It’s the most euphoric feeling ever.”

Alongside her art and illustration degree, with plans to become an architectural designer, she juggled university with 40-hour work weeks at a Chelsea boutique, and idly posted freestyle raps to Instagram. “It was just a hobby at first, and a reason for me to spend time with my dad.” He pushed and helped her to record them properly and, by 21, she’d signed a record deal. As she began to gain momentum, she kept up the pace, partly to honour her parents, but also to prove the doubters wrong. “Young, Black and female in Brixton is hard … you look a certain type of way, you’re categorised into a certain type of group of kids.” There have been “multiple moments”, she says; some teachers didn’t want her on their courses, assuming she’d fail. “The least I could do was block out all of the external noise, and care about myself how my mum has always cared about me,’ she says.

The payoff came quickly. Her track Bong Bing went viral, she was nominated for best newcomer at the Mobo awards, and she took acting roles in Top Boy – for which she also wrote the song Roadents – and Daniel Kaluuya’s Netflix film The Kitchen. Acting taught her more about herself – “having to put myself in someone else’s shoes made me feel even more comfortable in my own skin” – but her days ran to a strict schedule, “from like five o’clock in the morning. Routine really helps, but it also limits my creativity.” Clear Intentions, she says, speaks to finding the balance between that and a freer life.

Musically, she’s also come a long way from where she started. Her 2022 debut EP was almost exclusively drill. “I had so much more poetic music available at the time; I didn’t understand what music projects should be,” she says. “This time round, I thought I’d give them a little bit of everything.” Clear Intentions adds in grime, melodic guitars, hip-hop and subtle pockets of sound she describes as being “on the cusp of R&B”. From start to finish, it operates as a mental audit, “everything going on in my head at once,” she says. “All the different relationships with different people and things: myself, family, friends, my partner, work. It’s about what I do to maintain them, where they fail, when they succeed and what I can do to improve.”

She shrugs at genre boundaries, particularly given that they’re not always accurate for Black artists anyway – “if I was born in the grime era, they would have called me a grime artist” – and deliberately didn’t commission any featured artists for Clear Intentions: “I don’t feel like I need help telling this part of my story.”

There will be no champagne-soaked launch parties, either. Still chasing that euphoric feeling, she says she plans to spend the release day quietly alongside her mum and core team, “99.9% working”.