On the Rise
Unflirt

When the warmth of London summer fades, Unflirt — born Christine Senorin — remembers Brazil. She began spending time in the country visiting her partner in São Paulo for months at a time. There, her writing process was carved by the sea and sand. Between city streets and coastal escapes, Brazil became a place of peace and rediscovery. This, she explains, is where her latest EP Fleeting, released 7 November, took form. Written across Brazil and London over the course of two years, the project lingers in the light—songs of change, memory, and the nostalgia for a moment still unfolding.

Senorin has always written from the heart, but on Fleeting, she writes from the in-between. After a pair of tender EPs and a year spent touring with the ethereal Aurora and longtime friend Beabadoobee, Fleeting arrives like a deep breath: warmer, clearer and luminous. Those early projects, Bitter Sweet and April’s Nectar, caught the ache of love and loss in slow motion, establishing her as one of the most introspective new voices in the UK indie scene. With Fleeting, she brings a project that’s deeper and different.

There's something timeless about Senorin, and on Fleeting, this timelessness comes through in earnest. Though only 25, Senorin carries the torch of soft, melancholy early-2000s singer-songwriters, putting out work that feels like it’s caught in the grain of a film photograph. Her world is sun-faded and intimate: thrifted knits, washed colour palettes, a quiet self-possession that lingers in both her look and her sound.

Now signed to FADER Label, Fleeting is the project that has allowed Senorin to find her voice. These last two years have been ones of major growth for her, both personally and sonically. As Senorin explains: “[My] age played a big part in this EP… being 23, 24, 25—things go so quickly. For some reason, 25 feels so much older.” Coming into adulthood, Fleeting reflects her new sound and the colliding of past and present.

Fleeting “feels like a better representation of who I am and where I am in life,” she says. While her work as an artist began in her quiet London bedroom during lockdown, her catalogue has grown into a catalogue of shoegaze reflections. Since her first recordings in 2020, Unflirt’s angelic, wandering voice has drawn an ever-widening orbit of listeners.

Sonically, Fleeting is really the first time Unflirt has drawn so directly from all the genres she listens to—jazz, bossa nova, piano, violin. During her months in Brazil, she found herself immersed in the sound of classic Brazilian records, especially Arthur Verocai’s orchestrations. Listening to his 1972 self-titled album on the nine-hour coach ride from São Paulo to Rio, Senorin felt the music’s belonging to a place as much as a feeling. That connection shaped Fleeting, with songs rooted in the spaces and memories that first inspired them.

Surrounded by that warmth, the songs took shape. In Brazil, days moved slower. “It was one of the first times I wasn’t rushing,” she says. “I’d go days without touching my phone and just write or sit there listening.” That quiet rhythm, compounded with an Adrianne Lenker songwriting course that pushed Senorin to pay attention to the mundane and quotidian, became an unlearning: no studios, no pressure, just the guitar and the feeling of being alone with her songs.

The resulting raw honesty of Fleeting thus put Senorin’s voice and inner life front and centre. “I used to hide under the guitars and production,” she says. “There was a huge wall of sound and me behind it. But this was the first time I really understood that less is more.” For Senorin, maturing comes with not being afraid of a stripped-back, intimate song.

Fleeting is coming-of-age in the present tense—the emotional oscillation of coming and going is the root of Senorin’s nostalgia. The songs were shaped in motion, written between airports, bus rides and bedrooms. Its first single, “Seasong”, and final track, “Sopro”, are mirror emotions, two versions of the same farewell.

Leaning her head against the bus window, watching the Brazilian countryside pass by, Senorin thought she was leaving Brazil for the last time. “We took one last trip to the beach, and on the drive back to São Paulo, I got hit with this overwhelming feeling of dread, like, it’s over,” she remembers. “Then ‘Sopro’ was written later, when I actually left Brazil, and it felt like déjà vu—the same exact feeling.”

Both songs capture the ache of leaving and the beauty of noticing it as it happens. Where “Seasong” tries to hold on to every colour and sound before it slips away, “Sopro” exhales, accepting that nothing can be kept forever. Together they remind you that the good and the bad are both just fleeting.

But lamenting these moments doesn’t fix reality. Senorin admits: “Even though it’s nice to indulge in nostalgia and yearning… I realised it wasn’t helping me.” After years of returning to the same emotions, she began to see that longing could be its own trap. Facing and naming those feelings became a form of release, her way of making them benign and removing their hurting power.

Between places and years, from Brazil to LA and back to London, Senorin will always have her process: writing on the floor of her bedroom with her acoustic guitar, even when the rest of her life feels in motion. That small ritual keeps her tethered to herself. “The one thing that helps the project flow,” she says, “is that it all came from the same root: being written on a bed or on the floor in my room with my guitar.”

Songs like “Shame” and “Cut Your Hair” came late, written only after Senorin thought the EP was finished. They capture the harder emotions during those two years—“jealousy, self-doubt, shame”, as she names them, and the realisation that facing those feelings was the only way to let them go. “Facing these emotions and acknowledging them instead of romanticising,” she says, “was the only way you could remove them. No matter how uncomfortable they are, they’re fleeting too.”

Back in London now, when Senorin catches a rare bit of sun, she’s reminded of the memories of those slower, sweet days she’s immortalised in song. It’s impossible to stay in a single moment or to relive only the good ones. But according to her, “no matter how fast life can go… the only way to stop time is to be present.”