RAYE – THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE: REVIEW
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
RAYE
This Music May Contain Hope (Human Re Sources)
ONE OF THE MOST divisive* albums of 2025, guaranteed to split rooms of people who take these things very seriously in the smaller and smaller room such debates are held, was Rosalia’s album Lux. On one side: indulgent mess, showboating emptiness, confusing melange, excessive for a pop record. On the other side: wildly imaginative, daring, unafraid to go too far and once there, to revel in it, and loads of fun for a pop record.
I fell heavily on the latter side of that, which is useful to know when I say that Raye’s This Music May Contain Hope, already courting controversy a few weeks in, is right up my alley. Let me count the ways.
There are 17 songs in 73 minutes, effectively a double album, which you might suspect was a clearing out of the warehouse after a long-delayed debut album (2023’s My 21st Century Blues) which worked a familiar but still effective soul/soul-pop. However, the totality really feels like a surge of creativity that deserved an outlet not a fussy picker who would make it a single album. In any case, as people have said about the genus double/triple album since their dawn, or at least since The Beatles’ White album, your idea of the perfect 10-track set will likely be wildly different to your neighbour, not to mention fewer people even listen to an album all the way through, or even necessarily start at the beginning.
There are quite a few spoken introductions and mid-song sections, including the scene-setting opening track – sometimes like a less unhinged Kit Kat Kub Emcee and sometimes like a wise aunt, sometimes like a diary reading and sometimes like a friend breaking news – and a closing track whose final four minutes is Raye listing the album’s full credits and farewelling us with thanks for listening. Among the credits are guests the Rev Al Green, film composer Hans Zimmer, Raye’s singer/songwriter sisters Amma and Absolutely (aka Lauren and Abby-Lynn Keen, born either side of Raye, or Rachel Keen), and her grandfather, Grandad Michael.
Musically we veer from kohl-eyed Cabaret to big PA clubland, from finger-snapping swing band and rapid jazz vocalising to soul, disco and sing-it-to-the-rafters drama with a touch of operatic soprano and some rock star guitar, while lyrically we travel from spirit-crushing romance to playful dissing, from life-affirming friendships to life-smashing depression. The songs have emerged not from a delayed career but a nearly derailed life and Raye is frank, as it were.
Just that then? Ha! Did I mention the orchestration deployed with a flourish?
It doesn’t always make sense one track to another musically, though she remains at the core of it all so that feels less important; not all of the spoken bits needed to be said, but some are amusing; it will destroy any attempt to get more than one song on any of the genre-driven radio networks, but … but … but it is damn marvellous to see it being tried and (far more often than not) succeeding.
Click Clack Symphony – the Zimmer collaboration – is a West End-bound musical in five minutes, zig-zagging from spring-heeled delivery to orchestral charges with narration, despair and cascading impact. A lot goes on in those minutes. Actually, forget the West End, put some of it on the soundtrack to a space-bound blockbuster. And if that film needs a moment where the lead internally navigates a crisis of confidence that will climax in a deed that must be done because she is the only one who can, then I Know You’re Hurting is ready and waiting.
It’s not po-faced though. Beware … The South London Lover Boy is made for brassy backing vocals and punchy brass accompanying a line of strutting women taking over a south London street. The lyrics of I Hate The Way I Look Today are lacerating truth but musically it comes from a Harlem nightclub where a swooping camera glides by the suited male backing vocalists and solo saxophonist spotlit on the bandstand (Graeme Blevins, she tells us) on its way to Raye in a Givenchy dress and hair piled high.
It’s all driving down the highway and chasing some Stevie Wonder sun in Joy, where the Kean sisters come at us all at once, and the early single, Where Is My Husband, we know comes in glitter red and unison moves, mixing Vegas and Detroit with Memphis and New York. It’s an album made from the worst moments but suggesting those don’t have to be the only ones you hold on to.
Too much? Well yeah, if you’re limited in imagination. But why be that boring when Raye isn’t?
*There are not many records that achieve any kind of culture-wide recognition in the wildly fractured music environment of the 21st century. There’s a smaller number that engender much discussion and disagreement among both the in-the-know and the just-visiting-while-this-playlist-continues. And there’s an even tinier number which do that while not strictly speaking being in the mainstream, whatever that means today. Keep this in mind when someone says something was controversial, divided critics and fans etc etc.
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