How satisfying has it been to witness the transformation of Rachel Agatha Keen?
Five years ago, the singer – better known as Raye – made a bid for freedom, cutting ties with record label who’d forced her to make generic dance tracks she dismissed as “really boring”.
Liberated from those constraints, her emotionally-charged, instantly catchy debut album My 21st Century Blues showcased an artist of remarkable depth.
Powered by singles like Escapism and Oscar Winning Tears, it won a record-breaking six Brit Awards, including album of the year, which resulted in Raye “ugly crying on national television”.
So how do you follow that up?
Speaking to the BBC last year, she admitted to a momentary crisis of confidence.
“When you haven’t written for a long time, you start being extremely self-critical. So I was hating everything I was coming out with,” she said.
“I think the pressure is always going to be there, no matter what. But the luxurious thing now is that the pressure comes from me – because that wasn’t the case in the past.”
That anecdote tells you a great deal about This Music May Contain Hope, a concept album about overcoming heartbreak and self-doubt and internet trolls and stupid men.
Rather than surrender to those setbacks, Raye saddles up and sets off in search of happiness. Musically-speaking, she comes out swinging.
“There’s a there’s a thing I miss in in pop music today, which is that kind of Motown feeling, that classic feeling, that analogue feeling,” she told me last year. “So I was really excited to really, really experiment with that quite vividly.”
The spirit of old-school jazz, blues, big band and soul inhabits the record, which stretches out over 71 minutes, as Raye flexes her compositional muscles.
The singer described her second album as “a musical hug and an orchestral kiss” [Aliyah Otchere]
Opening track I Will Overcome finds her doom-scrolling through her phone on the rainy streets of Paris, set to an orchestral score that recalls Sondheim at his most melodramatic.
The narrative quickly cuts to South London, where heartbreak’s as prevalent as the pigeons.
She sings of “aimless” men with “spliffs hanging off their lips” on Beware… The South London Lover Boy, a song that uncovers the missing link between the Andrews Sisters and Beyoncé (finally!).
The single Nightingale Lane is named after the scene of her first heartbreak, on a sleepy street near Clapham.
On The WhatsApp Shakspeare, she warns listeners of a “wolf in sheep’s clothes, but in this case denim”, whose poetic voice notes win her heart, until she discovers she’s “one of seven other leading ladies”.
As his deceit becomes apparent, the music shifts from crisp hip-hop beats to a hard-boiled film noir crescendo. Dum, dum, dummmm.
Click Clack Symphony, scored by film legend Hans Zimmer, is a spiritual sequel to Raye’s 2022 smash Escapism. Except, instead of drowning her sorrows in a blur of drugs and meaningless sex, she calls up her girlfriends, applies her best waterproof mascara and gets the emotional support she needs.
That song ushers in the light. Life Boat is a simple affirmation of hope, set to a trancey house beat that shows Raye could still churn out a four-to-the-floor banger if she wanted.
Similarly Joy, a duet with her sisters Amma and Absolutely, has all the unfettered exuberance (and some of the strings) from Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough. Skin & Bone, which riffs on Aretha Franklin’s funk classic Rock Steady, is a slinky story of a night on the prowl.
The album features both a big band, and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as several guest appearances by legends of soul and jazz [Raye]
Elsewhere, we’re treated to a duet with soul legend Al Green, an ironically upbeat ode to body dysmorphia (I Hate The Way I Look Today) and acres of spoken word narration.
And I haven’t even mentioned Where The Hell Is My Husband – a stone cold classic that debuted at Glastonbury last summer, and which is approaching its one billionth stream on Spotify.
Throughout, Raye sings like her life depends on it. Her vocal stacks and counter-melodies are full of intricate detail; and her phrasing is exquisite, even on the jazz numbers where lesser pop singers would come unstuck.
It sounds like a lot. It is a lot. The album is overstuffed, eccentric, kitsch, dramatic and a little bit exhausting. It even ends with four minutes of “credits” – where Raye thanks everyone who worked on the record, including all 80 players in the London Symphony Orchestra.
The first time I heard it, it was overwhelming. On the third, fourth, fifth listen, it comes into focus.
Not everything works, but in an era of AI slop, and meme songs designed for Tiktok clip-ability, it’s reassuring to hear Raye unapologetically going for broke.
This music may, in fact, contain hope for the survival of pop itself.