‘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 pebble

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.

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