THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. by RAYE

A South London singer-songwriter spent seven years as a ghost in another person’s profession. She co-wrote for Beyoncé, for Charli XCX, for John Legend, and when Polydor Records wished to hire her pen to the following title on the decision sheet, she obliged. She was sixteen when she signed, and no one at sixteen is aware of find out how to say no to a machine that huge. The label saved her debut hostage for years, instructed her “Call on Me” wanted to chart earlier than they’d greenlight a full-length, and steered her towards dance-pop she had little interest in making. Rachel Keen—RAYE—broke the contract in 2021, went unbiased by means of Human Re Sources, began proudly owning her masters, and launched My twenty first Century Blues right into a market that rewarded her with six BRIT Awards in a single ceremony, a number-one UK single, and the form of industrial momentum most major-label artists spend total careers begging for. Then her automotive acquired stolen with all her songwriting notebooks within the trunk, and she or he posted an image of a cake iced with “sorry ur car got stolen” and instructed the web to not count on a second album any time quickly. The police discovered the automotive months later, every part untouched. She went again to writing.

THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. comes from a lady who has been publicly humiliated by an business, publicly vindicated by an viewers, and now needs to speak about one thing apart from both of these issues. RAYE has little interest in victory laps right here. She has curiosity in loneliness, the sort that follows you right into a Parisian resort room at 2:27 am after seven Negronis and a crimson gown no one seen, the sort that has you unzipping your personal gown alone at two within the morning whereas your hypothetical husband takes his time discovering you. The album splits into 4 seasonal acts throughout seventeen songs and stays with one girl’s physique transferring by means of rooms the place no one else stands, and it does this with a specificity that retains the unhappiness from ever going notional. A pillow that is by no means touched and gathers mud. Lipstick kissed onto the again of her personal hand so she will be able to see what her love appears like. A petroleum station cease in a stranger’s automotive to purchase a big bottle of gin whereas crying. The silly, undignified, weirdly exact issues that occur to an individual who truly has no one to go house to.

RAYE attracts the lads on this album with the care of a lady who has dated sufficient of them to construct a subject information. “Beware.. The South London Love Boy” doubles as a public security announcement a couple of species. He’ll document your arse earlier than you’ve got even sat down, pull up in an all-black automotive studying poems out the window, and inform you he is too poisonous for you, darling, with the precise charisma that makes you disbelieve him. “The WhatsApp Shakespeare” recasts the identical metropolis’s courting pool as a fairy-tale slasher, Eve deceived by her personal traitor, a person whose “sweet poetry” and cursive kisses disguise the truth that he would not put his sort on paper. She reveals she was considered one of seven main girls, starring in a romantic thriller she did not know had a forged. “Skin & Bones” strips the comedy all the way down to pure exasperation. A person cancels plans forty-five minutes earlier than he is supposed to select her up and suggests skipping dinner for dessert at his place, and RAYE reduces him to an anatomy lesson:

“Just skin and bones
And lungs and a heart
Two eyes and a liver
And a nose and no brain.”

The jokes cease at “Goodbye Henry.” Henry is not even his actual title (she’s being respectful), and she or he tells you flat-out that this feels joyful, however it isn’t joyful in any respect. She sips her gin in silence on the Railway Tavern in her native and kisses the person goodbye. She imagines an alternate life the place they’re along with three kids. Al Green enters from Memphis, Tennessee, singing about heartaches that do not get simple, and his voice alongside hers—a seventy-nine-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old girl agreeing throughout many years that love leaving wounds the identical at any age—is perhaps essentially the most devastating duet on a pop document this 12 months. “Nightingale Lane” covers comparable floor from a larger distance. Her past love kissed her goodbye on a avenue within the South London suburbs, her lips skinny and beer-stained and tear-stained, and now when she drives down that street she drives slowly, daring herself at crimson lights to say “somebody loved me once, and someday, someone will again.” She’s dabbled in love since, perhaps each different summer time. It by no means lasts. They by no means stick round. She says she believes sometime somebody will come alongside and knock these partitions down, and the track lets her imagine it with out insisting you do too.

RAYE’s household retains the album from drowning in his personal grief. Her grandmother’s voice word opens the complete document. “Call me, please, we need to pray.” That presence recurs all through, the older technology pulling the youthful one again from the ledge by telephone. On “Fields,” RAYE leaves her granddad Michael a voicemail apologizing for months of silence, asking if he will get lonely too, and his reply arrives with the plainness of somebody who has been alive lengthy sufficient to know that individual fact would not want ornament (“You can feel lonely in a crowded room.” ). He tells her she’ll hear his songs when he dies, and RAYE tells him “so long it’s good, gives me life,” and none of them oversells the second. Her sisters Amma and Absolutely sing on “Joy,” a gospel-flavored declaration that rebukes unhappiness with clapping arms and the promise that pleasure comes within the morning, and the three of them collectively sound much less like featured artists than girls who grew up harmonizing in the identical lounge.

Hope on this album doesn’t arrive as triumph. “I Will Overcome” exists as a result of RAYE wanted to jot down herself a reminder, and the hole between needing that reminder and truly believing it stays seen the entire approach by means of. “Click Clack Symphony,” co-produced with Hans Zimmer, begins with RAYE calculating the percentages of being born, one in 4 hundred trillion, and confessing she will be able to’t conquer leaving the home. She eats, sleeps, scrolls, and toils, and the track turns into about calling your ladies and selecting to exit anyway, the Zimmer orchestration swelling behind the sound of excessive heels on pavement—a movie rating for the genuinely mundane act of placing on a gown whenever you’d slightly keep in mattress. The jazzy-induced “I Hate the Way I Look Today” begins precisely the place the title guarantees. RAYE seemed within the mirror and cried, she detests her depraved thoughts, she bargains with herself that she’s okay to be lonely if she’s lonely and thin. Then the saxophone bleeds in and she or he turns, barely, towards self-correction: “words of affirmation must repeat ’till I believe it.”

Mike Sabath’s manufacturing throughout the album earns its vary. “Beware.. The South London Love Boy” bounces on an epic pop-soul chassis, “Winter Woman” descends right into a slow-motion glide, “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” swings with a Motown-adjacent brass stomp, and “Fields” strips to piano, guitar, and voice and the sound of a person who has been writing songs his total life enjoying Clair de Lune for his granddaughter. “Happier Times Ahead” zooms outward, away from RAYE solely. A woman in a window on a Saturday morning clutches her aching coronary heart. A middle-aged man driving his van on Bond Street will make the final lonely pint on the bar the spotlight of his day. Auntie Jean in the course of England cries after sixty years of marriage as a result of her Roger has left her alone within the land of the residing. None of those individuals are RAYE, and none of them know one another, and the track tells all of them the identical factor. It cannot rain perpetually. It would not fake to understand how or when the rain stops. RAYE’s voice shifts with every room she enters, half-spoken and conspiratorial on the Love Boy monitor, theatrically and totally projected on “The WhatsApp Shakespeare,” lowered to a thrum on “Nightingale Lane.” She writes in a different way for every of those girls she performs, even when all of them are her.

The funniest track on the album may additionally be the saddest. On “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” RAYE needs a diamond ring on her marriage ceremony finger, a giant shiny diamond she will be able to wave round and speak about, and she or he’s reviewing purposes, and she or he’s 5’5″ with brown eyes and a rising worry she’s going to die alone. Her grandma stated it: “Your husband is coming.” The longing for marriage on this song is simultaneously ridiculous and completely sincere, and RAYE doesn’t ask you to pick one reading over the other. She just lets both sit there, the comedy and the ache in the same breath, and the brass section carries the whole thing with the energy of a woman who has decided that wanting what she wants requires no apology.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “I Hate the Way I Look Today,” “Goodbye Henry,” “Fields”