Pop Star, DJ, Dance, and ‘Sporty’ Fitness Maven—Melanie C is Living Well Within the Many Sides of Her Identity on Ninth Album

“A lot of life” has happened since Melanie Chisholm released her eighth album, Melanie C, in 2020. There was self-reflection and discovery, and a rebound. “I’ve done a lot of soul-searching,” Chisolm says from Sydney, Australia, where she’s filming her second season as a coach on The Voice Australia. “Now I just want to have some fun and get people dancing again.”

Leveraging the different parts of her identity, as a fitness connoisseur, a pop artist, and a DJ, Chisholm started reflecting on what first guided her into music, years before she answered that fateful advertisement in 1994 that changed her life, and led her to join a new group called the Spice Girls, and become Sporty Spice.

Prior to that, as a teen in the early ‘90s, Chisholm was introduced to the house music scene during a visit to Costa Brava, Spain, while attending the Doreen Bird College of Performing Arts in London. Then, barefaced and donned in what would become her signature tracksuit, she started hitting the London rave scene hard.

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Fusing a master workout playlist and the perfect dance floor soundtrack, Chisholm channels what was always within her on her ninth album, Sweat. Sampling Diana Ross’ 1981 dance hit “Work That Body,” crystalline beats pump up the title track, setting up the scene of sweaty weekend raves.

After releasing Melanie C, Chisholm says life provided her with plenty of new material. As much as Sweat relives the euphoria of her teenage raving years, it also reflects the past six years of writing around an emotional breakup and through meeting someone new and falling in love.

Sweat slips into the bass-and-synth pulse of “Drum Machine,” and “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” to the R&B-dance of “Cashmere,” the anthemic “Free to Love,” and the sultry “One Track Mind.” Chisholm also finds a way to dance through the sadness on more personal tracks of resilience like “Undefeated Champion,” and the feats of finding ways to rise up throughout her career, and reflections of a past breakup on “Till It Breaks.”

[RELATED: Melanie C Discusses The Evolution Of Her Writing From Spice Girls To Today]

“A lot of life happened in making this record,” says Chisholm. “There was a lot to be expressed, and it crossed this whole section of my life from those low, dark, angry, energetic feelings to these really joyous, euphoric moments. It’s an interesting journey of life within the record.”

Recorded between London, Stockholm, and Los Angeles, Chisholm wrote Sweat within two and a half years, along with a group of co-writers and producers. “Every song on this album was pretty much started in the room on the day, in the session, from a conversation and talking stylistically where we wanted to go,” she says. “That’s when I really feel like I’ve got ownership of a song, when something starts organically on day one.”

Now as much a part of her craft as singing and songwriting, DJ-ing, which Chisholm first started exploring in 2018, also helped inform the sound of the album. Her DJ career has expanded into playing worldwide and has allowed her to test-run different sounds, outside of what she’s done as a solo artist and as a Spice Girl.

“Having that break in between my self-titled album and this one just gave me the space I needed to understand where I wanted to make the changes and help it evolve,” she says.

“Obviously, everybody knows the beginnings of my career with the Spice Girls. I’m a pop artist, and I always will be, so it was trying to navigate what I love in the dance world, but not losing who I am as a pop artist, and bringing those worlds together.”

DJ-ing, she says, has also given her a different perspective on listening to and making music. “I’ve come to this conclusion now that my work and my life are not separate entities,” she says. “They’re very much the same thing, and DJ-ing has brought so much joy into my life.”

And it’s another element of self-expression, something Chisholm first learned to tap into with the Spice Girls. “We were very much expressing our experiences, what was going on, and always trying to find a positive thread throughout,” she says. “In those darkest times for me, music has been the thing that has been my savior, my friend, my company. Even when it’s tough, and you’re on the floor, you’ve got the strength to get through this, so it’s very celebratory in its joyous moments, and its darkest.”

Thinking back to her solo debut, Northern Star, in 1999, there was a “beauty and naivety” that she’s still proud of. Released two years before the Spice Girls’ initial split, Northern Star was Chisholm’s moment as a songwriter.

[RELATED: The Best Part of Your Favorite Spice Girls Classic Was Actually Written in the Loo]

“All of my songwriting experience had been with the Spice Girls, and we’d written as a collective, so it was very authentic to who we were, but who we were as a group of people,” she says. “Then, I went out on my own, and I felt like I had so much I wanted to say and express.”

Still, Chisholm feels emotional thinking back to her writing sessions around Northern Star,and remains connected to those songs, which have evolved over time. “Sometimes I’ve written songs, and it’s been like a prediction of what the future holds,” she says. “Songwriting is such a crazy, crazy thing.”

Part of what left a bigger imprint on Chisholm during the Northern Star session was working with songwriters like the late Billy Steinberg, who co-wrote Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” and hits for Whitney Houston, Heart, the Bangles, the Pretenders, and more throughout the 1980s and ’90s.Along with producer Rick Nowels, Chisholm and Steinberg co-wrote her No. 1 hit “I Turn to You,” a song that has taken on new meaning since Steinberg’s passing in February 2026, and through her work on The Voice Australia, when a recent contestant reimagined the song.

“She took ‘I Turn to You,’ and she completely changed the melody,” recalls Chisholm. “It was extraordinary, and it was so poignant, because we lost Billy Steinberg recently, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember being at Rick’s studio, sitting next to Billy with his big pile of lyrics. He had so many ideas and was so prolific in his writing…it feels like yesterday.

“I was very sad to hear of his passing, so that song now becomes even more poignant,” she adds. “It’s even more special to me than it ever was.”

Other songwriters who affected Chisholm’s work throughout her career include Richard “Biff” Stannard and Matt Rowe, longtime collaborators with the Spice Girls and co-writers on many of the group’s hits, including “Wannabe,” “2 Become 1,” and “Spice Up Your Life.”

Chisholm remembers the first time writing with the other Spice Girls, along with “Matt and Biff” in a small studio in East London, and “Wannabe” was one of the first things that came out of the sessions.

“We were just a bundle of energy,” she remembers. “We were determined and boisterous and chaotic, and Matt and Biff wanted to bottle that and get it on a record. So ‘Wannabe’ was us going ‘we’re not gonna even think about verse, chorus, bridge … just sing whatever comes into your head. And from that madness, they constructed a song which launched us onto the world.”

Chisolm says “Wannabe” captured the pure energy of the Spice Girls but it was also a great, early exercise in songwriting. “That was such a good lesson in songwriting, because we were all influenced by everything around us, all the artists we heard from our parents’ record collections, and people we discovered,” she says. “And it was so lovely to say, ‘There are these songwriting rules that we’d adhere to, but let’s break the rules. Let’s do anything. Let’s make something unique.’ That’s always stayed with me through everything that I’ve done.”

Now 52, Chisholm says there are moments when she questions whether she still has something left to say—until life happens. 

“Lots of creatives, we’re our most creative when we’re feeling pretty low,” she laughs. “When life’s tough, it’s ‘Well, at least I’ll get some good material out of this.’”

The biggest difference on Sweat, she adds, is that she is leaning more into “fun” and “joy’ on the album and marrying her love of fitness and being Sporty Spice, with dancing. “I have this persona when I’m on stage, which is so much more confident than who I am walking down the street,” Chisholm says. “There’s a kind of invincibility when you’re on stage, but like most performers, we’re not like that when we’re in the supermarket.”

She’s up for the challenge of capturing the energy of the album in a live performance. “I feel like it’s time to mix things up,” she says. “I’m going to approach the live show differently to how I have in the past.” 

Another thing that’s still clear for Chisholm at this stage in her career as a solo artist and a DJ is that she “will always be a Spice Girl,” and admits that they are still a “bundle of energy” together.

“It hasn’t changed a bit,” she says. “We don’t often get to be all together at once, or even in twos or threes, but when we do get together, it’s like yesterday. It’s like a family thing, when you go home … with your siblings. It’s exactly the same. That energy, that dynamic, it never shifts.”

Though there have been peaks and troughs throughout her career, the last few years have left Chisholm in a positive place. “I’m just loving what I’m doing, and I just feel so grateful when I toured with the Spice Girls in 2019,” she says. “It gave us a moment to really appreciate how our music had touched the lives of so many people. And I’ve taken that into my solo work.

“You get to a point in your life where you’re like, ‘I just want to do the good stuff.’ I ain’t got time for doing things I don’t like, working with people I don’t want to work with, so I’m just doing all the good stuff and having a ball.”

Main photo by Graham Cruz