RAYE ‘This Music May Contain Hope’ review: A hugely ambitious swing for the fences

There’s artistic growth, and then there’s the radical transformation of RAYE. Five years ago to this very week, she cracked the top ten with ‘Bed’, a basic, club-ready collaboration with Joel Corry and David Guetta that she’s since dismissed as “really boring”. Now, having detonated her major label deal with Polydor in July 2021, then re-emerged as an independent artist whose exuberant debut 21st Century Blues swept the board at the 2024 BRIT Awards, she’s swinging big. Really big.

The South Londoner’s astonishing second album, This Music May Contain Hope, is a 71-minute epic that pings between jazzy toe-tappers (‘Beware… The South London Lover Boy’, ‘I Hate the Way I Look Today’), grandiose ballads (‘I Know You’re Hurting’, ‘Nightingale Lane’) and florid string sections evoking Hollywood’s golden age.  If the climax of ‘I Will Overcome’ brings to mind anything, it’s less a Bond theme, and more the melodramatic denouement of a Joan Crawford movie.

This Music May Contain Hope is a concept album about overcoming self-doubt, heartbreak and hollow Romeos – the fourth track is titled ‘The WhatsApp Shakespeare’ – but one loose and sprawling enough to allow for musical detours. RAYE pulls off crackling funk on ‘Skin & Bones’, recruits Al Green for the silky soul ballad ‘Goodbye Henry’, and reminds us with ‘Life Boat’ that she can still write a club banger when she wants to. Her latest single, ‘Click Clack Symphony’, features beats that mimic the thwack of high heels on a hardwood floor and crashing instrumentation from Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. It’s a girls’ night out bop in the same way that a croquembouche is just a pastry.

And like a croquembouche, this album gives you a lot to digest. There are extended spoken word sections, tracks that switch tempo midway through, and ear-snagging flourishes like the brief snippet of chipmunk vocals on ‘Winter Woman’. Throughout, RAYE displays a great ear for detail – “His lips were thin and beer-stained and tear-stained,” she sings on ‘Nightingale Lane’ – and a deft turn-of-phrase. “I can’t shake this, I can’t fake this, I should just pay to rearrange this,” she sings on ‘I Hate the Way I Look Today’. It’s a reference to facial filler, perhaps, on a song that definitely isn’t musical filler.

There are bits destined to be skipped, not least the four minutes of contributor credits that RAYE recites at the end, name by name, but her warmth and generosity paper over moments that could feel de trop. The euphoric disco of ‘Joy’, which features RAYE’s younger sisters Amma and Absolutely, is every bit as infectious as her recent chart-topper ‘Where Is My Husband!’

Besides, given how creatively constrained RAYE felt during her major label days, when she was encouraged to stay in her lane as a mainstream dance-pop artist making bops for All Bar One and Love Island, it feels mean-spirited to quibble with the odd moment of over-indulgence. This Music May Contain Hope is an exciting, life-affirming listen that reminds you it’s never too late to turn things around. In a way, it’s the RAYE story writ large, with absolutely killer choruses.