RAYE brings some old-fashioned razzle dazzle to her new album, ‘This Music May Contain Hope’ (Press)
“I’ll swing round this street lamp and I’ll give you a story…” promises RAYE on This Music May Contain Hope. And boy, does she deliver, with an epic technicolor movie of an album. The artist born Rachel Keen leans hard into the romance of vintage Hollywood melodrama while keeping a witty, modern head on her shoulders. Trad and cocktail jazz, blues, pop, sax solos, Prince-indebted power balladry, silky neo-soul, chamber music, funk, house, hip-hop, and accordion-backed chanson… it all comes pelting round the bends for a series of close-up cameos. Such fearless musicianship sets a stage on which great love can die like a phone battery, toxic south-London loverboys stalk the streets like B-movie beasties and our plucky high-heeled heroine must put on her headphones to dance away her despair.
If this all sounds a bit chaotic, don’t worry. There is a structure. The album works its way through the seasons, starting with the autumn melancholy of “Girl Under a Grey Cloud” (a spoken word affair buoyed by cinematic strings, on which we meet “a woman in her late twenties” walking from a bar to her hotel. “She has no umbrella, she is seven negronis deep and knows there is a hole she is desperately trying to fill,” RAYE tells us). She dives into the darkness with “Winter Woman” (containing echoes of her 2023 hit “Escapism”), thawing out with the spring soul of “Goodbye Henry” (featuring R&B legend Al Green) and building to the giddy summer brass of single “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” The way the 28-year-old throws her vocal virtuosity and infectious delight into every moment of her storytelling is breathtaking.
For all her musical brilliance, RAYE’s problems are relatable. She’ll be overheard in one outtake offering to make tea for the band and despairing over her single status in another (it’s been five-and-a-half years now, she says). She has a matey warmth that translates well on this album, as she sings about needing her girlfriends to drag her out on a Friday night (on the snappy feminist anthem “Click Clack Symphony”, aided by Hollywood maestro Hans Zimmer), and fesses up to her insecurities on the jazz-scatty “I Hate The Way I Look”. There’s communality in the many layers and styles of backing choirs, from a casual vox-popping of friends and family insisting, “I’m not giving up yet”, on “Lifeboat”, to a cameo from her grandfather Michael who tells her, “You can feel lonely in a crowded room” on the bluesy “Fields”.
Anyone daft enough to still be dissing Britain’s most exhilarating pop star as “the SHEIN Amy Winehouse” (an insult she laughed off in a recent Vogue interview) will have to can it now. Yes, like the late Camdenite, she’s putting a messy, modern spin on old-school sounds. But pop has always eaten itself (I remember my grandad describing his amazement on hearing Lorenz & Hart’s 1930s ballad, “Blue Moon”, reinvented as a peppy doo wop hit in 1961). RAYE devours it all and spits it back out as stardust.
In that same Vogue interview, she described parting ways with former label Polydor and her triumphant independent release of Mercury-shortlisted 2023 debut album, My 21st Century Blues, as a full-throttle pursuit of her creative freedom. Even after the massive success of that record, though, she still feels she’s “running after her career” as though somebody is chasing her. Her appetite for the heart-on-sleeve razzle dazzle of it all is glorious. This Music May Contain Hope is a pure audio spectacle that will have you screaming for an encore.