Her EP isn’t the only place where you can feel this newfound confidence, either. She exuded it on stage at Rock in Rio Lisboa in June, in her Balmain red-carpet looks and on Instagram, where she sometimes shares snippets of life with her husband, footballer Andre Gray, and their twin girls, who turned two in August. I ask how it felt to embark on not just a solo career but motherhood at the same time as bandmate Edwards (they gave birth within weeks of each other) and she describes it as “incredible”. “We’ve always been close, but it brought us even closer. This is a bond that only me and her share – it’s really special.”
The biggest catalyst for her unbridled self-assurance, though? Letting go of the past. She was born to a half-Bajan mum and a half-Jamaican dad in Buckinghamshire, with both her award-winning 2021 BBC documentary Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop and Power and last year’s memoir Believe shining lights on her experiences of being ignored, undervalued and pigeonholed as the only Black member of the band – both at the hands of the music industry and fans alike. “I let those experiences really beat me down. There was a period where I lost so much self-confidence. I lost my self-belief and my worth,” she says. “It consumed me, but it’s not there now. I refuse to be in that place anymore.” Not only did speaking up help Pinnock to process that egregious mistreatment, it also raised further awareness of racism in the pop sphere and earned her a National Diversity Award.
“I can finally just be me,” she continues, as a relieved smile grows across her face. Now in the driver’s seat when it comes to her image and sound, Pinnock tells me she feels able to celebrate – and revel in – her Blackness. It runs through everything from the references in her music to the team she surrounds herself with and how she styles her hair, which she took a conscious approach towards when entering this new era of her career. The time afforded to experiment with styles was limited as a member of the band, so now, she says, it’s a central part of her aesthetic: from wearing different types of braids to creating elaborate hair structures. It’s a far cry from The X Factor days when the show’s stylists shaved and dyed her hair red to imitate Rihanna’s look at the time. “It was very much like, ‘Let’s not give you a proper identity of your own’,” she recalls.
