As a former child star, it’s often assumed that Chlöe is the product of a particularly controlling behind-the-scenes team, orchestrating her career. In fact, almost everything comes directly from her. “I write my music, I produce my music; I produced and engineered almost everything my sister and I did,” she says. “Very few people know that. But I’m not just beauty; I also have brains. My favourite subjects at school were maths and science and technology.”
Impressively, her skills were self-taught. “I learned how to play piano by seeing which chords were what and how to play certain chords online,” she says. “I taught myself how to use music production software, and I would literally just look up producers and engineers online to see how they did things.”
Knowing all the hard graft she’s put in is what gives her the confidence to be true to herself. “I’m pretty adamant and vocal when it comes to my music, and I don’t back down,” she says. “Everything that you’ve seen and heard from me has been what I have wanted to do. And you know, of course, I definitely take in opinions from people, and because I’m still young and I never think it’s a bad thing to learn and to grow. But you have to trust your inner voice.”
It’s what she remembers when she feels imposter syndrome, too. “Do I ever have it? Of course. But I think it’s starting to fade away, because I am realising that, ‘Hey, your hard work has got you here, so you have every right to be here in this room’. And I think we have to remind ourselves of that whenever imposter syndrome starts to sneak up on us.”
She’s learned to cultivate other areas of her life as well as her work, which helps her keep her celebrity status – and the good and bad parts of that – in perspective. Her downtime is spent doing Lego (which she “finds therapeutic”) and hanging out with her friends and family. “My circle’s really small – my godmother, my godbrother, my sisters,” she says. She and Halle remain exceptionally close, and collaborated on a song, Want Me, on Chlöe’s album. “We both have different, very busy lives, so it was nice we were able to be in one place at the same time and create this together,” she says. “She just killed it.”