Denise Chaila: The Limerick rapper on racism, breast reduction, and getting back in the music game
Denise Chaila is playing Cyprus Avenue in Cork at the weekend. Picture: Rich Gilligan
When we meet at the No 1 Pery Square hotel in Limerick, Denise Chaila greets a few familiar faces. She’s warmly received by people she says she has not seen in a while, as she hasn’t been around the city as much as she used to. “Home is a bit everywhere at the moment,” she says.
In truth, none of us have seen much of the Zambia-born, Limerick-raised artist in recent times. Her low profile marks quite a contrast to the early part of the decade when she was the obvious rising star of the Irish music scene, and a ubiquitous figure in the music press and on related TV shows. So what happened? Basically, there was burnout involved, and she felt the need to take herself away from the public glare.
Now, the 32-year-old is ready to reintroduce herself to the world – starting with gigs in Cork and Limerick, followed by a new album in 2027.
“I’ve considered changing my name several times before this release, I don't think I will because it's far more interesting to let a story keep telling itself,” says Chaila. “There is a big part of me that has been on an adventure, it’s been kind of wild, the places that I've found myself these last four years.” In the west of Ireland, she has been exploring and satisfying her quench for curiosity. Instead of listening to people “yell at” her on the internet, she says she would rather befriend a 70-year-old man in a cosy pub and chat about history for hours.
“It’s interesting to engage with local communities everywhere you go and just sort of fall in love with a country like that, otherwise, things start to get a little bit stagnant. I don't want to play Russian roulette with Ryanair every time that I feel like I need an adventure.”
Since her last mixtape four years ago, has not released music under her own name. Her breakthrough single Chaila, part of her first mixtape was released in 2020, during Ireland’s first lockdown. She won the RTÉ Choice Music Prize Album of the Year in 2021. The next year, she supported Ed Sheeran on his Irish tour and featured on the remix of his track.
Used to performing in rooms where the maximum capacity was 100, her career grew “beyond her understanding” after lockdown.
“If I'm being honest, it felt really psychedelic because the way people related to me and spoke to me also transformed overnight,” she recalls. “For a couple of years, I was very happy to just work without stopping, because it felt like the momentum was carrying me. I was very quickly starting to feel like I was putting myself on a treadmill of music release and performance.”
When she was eight, her family relocated to Limerick after suffering racist abuse directed at their home in Dublin. Her taking a step back from her music career was partly due to the wave of racial abuse she was receiving on social media. Sick of it all, she eventually booked a flight to Mexico, where she reconnected with others – and herself.
“I loathe to mention this, because sometimes I fear that saying its name will invoke it in my life again, but there was just a really heavy onslaught of racial abuse that I was receiving online that was clouding my ability to access the people who love my music,” she recalls.
“At any given moment, the page would refresh and 30 new comments calling me slurs I've never heard of before would be filling my pages, my DMs, my comments. That was a very, very rough experience.”
By some, she was told it was “part of the game”. “I envied my peers who got the privilege of being criticized for who they were and the music that they made as opposed to something like their race, which they have no control over. This is still me being tied into a history of inequality and enslavement.” Since she was last in the public eye, she also worked a lot on her health. She said some experiences have “transformed” her. Among them was a breast reduction surgery. A procedure she recommends to other women who might benefit from it.
“Absolutely just do it and bite the bullet, because there's no pain that I will ever experience that is equivalent to the relief that I felt when I got up off that surgical bed and realised they had taken one and a half kilos from my chest alone. Now I'm standing up straighter, I’m looking people in the eye, and I'm not in all this pain all the time. It's amazing, it's a miracle.”
Now in her early 30s, Chaila admits she is “disillusioned with the world” and no longer has the same stars in her eyes. But she still has big dreams. “I think part of calling my power back to myself is realising that I made music to connect with people, not to go on a mad run around the world or to burnout trying to chase an industry standard,” she says.
Next year’s album, as yet untitled, will sound “nothing like GO Bravely”. Whilst she loved the younger version of herself, she wants to be more playful with her sound.
“There was a time when I was concerned that I was getting a little bit like this weird hybrid between Michelle Obama and Megan Thee Stallion,” she says.
“I'm so much more eccentric than the girl who I see who is talking on The Late Late Show. I'm proud of her, I like her very much, and she shows up a lot in my life. But the version of me that gets off a train and stumbles into Joyce's apartment to get our hair braided and giggle before a rehearsal is not the version of me that will appear when the cameras turn on. I do want more opportunities to play.”
These days, Chaila is more interested in letting go. As a musician, she finds it difficult not to think in terms of identifiers. “Some people are just living their lives. Some people just wake up and they're like ‘My name is Jim, next question.’ Meanwhile, I'm here talking to people about what's the look, what are we trying to convey," she says. “You get talking to the wrong people, and they'll be like, ‘Well, if you lose some weight, we can market you like this. And if you gain some weight, then sure, that's body positivity’. Dark as hell, but there's a pragmatism sometimes to the way conversations happen about who you are.”
Recently, she has been on a couple of good dates. One cold night in November, she somehow found herself on a canoe by Lough Derg, in Mount Shannon, Co Clare. “God, I'd never sailed a canoe in my life, and I was freaking out in this life jacket,” she laughs. “As soon as we got onto the water, everything was still. The moon was out, the water was glassy. The next day, we repeated the experiment and just went around rowing and singing to each other around Lough Derg.”
She has found a happy place at bonfires armed with a guitar, and surrounded by people she enjoys being with. “Suddenly, the whole family and some guests are around us, and we're awake until 3am,” she says. “I think that there's a romance to being embraced by someone's life, not just by them.”
This embrace has helped Chaila find a community and personal peace, and that creative spark that has led to her making music again.
- Denise Chaila performs at Cork’s Cyprus Avenue on Sunday, September 20; and at The Commercial in Limerick on September 26, as part of her tour An Seo.
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