Dexter in the Newsagent got her stage name from a joke at a party in high school. “Someone was like, ‘What’s her name?’ And I said Dexter, because I thought that was so funny,” she recalls. (“In the Newsagent” took a bit more brainstorming, and came from the need to optimize her visibility in a sea of Google searches for a certain Showtime series.)
Born Charmaine Ayoku, this south London singer-songwriter has been making music for half a decade, but had a major breakthrough with her debut mixtape, Time Flies, last fall. It’s a bedroom-pop record in sound and execution; she recorded most of it at her family home, and its style draws on early PinkPantheress and Clairo (one of Dexter’s favorites) along with Imogen Heap and SZA.
Dexter’s sound is mesmerizing, but her lyrics are precise and confessional. She wants her music to feel warm and familiar, but “also [like you] had never heard it before.” “Special,” a twinkling low-key dance-pop track, is a shining example of what she does best. On the track, she daydreams over a crush’s all-consuming effect on her: “I would give up so much in my life,” she coos. “Just so I could say you’re mine.” Ayoku sounds so assured of this person’s effect on her that you believe her when she sings about needing them just as much as a good night’s rest.
Ayoku’s writing style is lucid and honest, a trait which nearly spooked her from releasing certain songs. On “Care,” she sings about the all-encompassing grief she felt after her father’s passing. “I feel alone/Even though I know you’re there,” she murmurs, a lone acoustic guitar providing accompaniment. “If I hurt myself/Would anybody care?” After recording a take at the studio, she looked over at her producer, and saw they were tearing up. Plenty of anxious thoughts swam through her mind: Was she doing too much? Going too far? But she took her chances, with beneficial results. “Seeing other people’s reactions to it confirmed with me that … there’s nothing wrong with people just hearing your thoughts as they are,” she says. “And that actually might at points help other people.”
Ayoku was born in the early 2000s and raised by Nigerian parents near Brixton. Her mother and siblings have been very supportive of her career from the beginning. “My sister asked if she can be my manager, like, 10 times,” she quips. In her final years of secondary school, she ditched class to go see Rex Orange County (her excuse was a trip to the dentist), and she encountered a whole new world. Each concert she saw increased her passion for music tenfold; seeing Solange in 2019 was transformative, as was one of Tyler, the Creator’s first shows back in the U.K. after a four-year ban. “Solange rewired my brain,” she declares. “It’s just so amazing to see Black women who aren’t necessarily making the music that is considered to be more stereotypical for a Black woman to make… She’s just at the top of her game. Seeing that reminded me that anything’s actually possible.”
Dexter had always wanted to make music, but had no idea where to start. So when the Covid pandemic left her alone at home with her thoughts, she saw it as her chance to dive in: “The origin of when I started releasing music really just came out of, ‘I’m not at school. I have nothing to do.’” She released her first EP, I Do Love a Good Sandwich, in 2021, with Fortune Cookie following in 2022. Her popularity grew from there, and though she was set to attend Manchester University for an art history degree, she ended up pulling out three days before classes began.
She’s a close friend of 2025 Future of Music honoree Jim Legxacy, and her feature on his Black British Music album (on the track “Dexter’s Phone Call”) brought her new fans. Since seeing the positive reception that got, she’s been thinking about a full-length collaboration with Jim, noting inspiration from the continued partnership between Kendrick Lamar and SZA. When it comes to her bucket-list collaborations, she names Tems, Justin Bieber, Imogen Heap, and most especially Clairo.
In the meantime, Dexter has her sights set on writing her debut album, but she hopes to loosen the reins and let her hair down this time around. “I took [Time Flies] so serious,” she notes. “It consumed every thought of every day. So right now I’m just trying to have loads of fun.” She marvels at how it feels to get a spot on this Rolling Stone feature. “To have people whose job it is to literally write pieces about music… talking about my music in depth… this is serious now,” she says. “And I really do feel like I can do all the things that I know I want to do now.”
