Not having released an album since 2016, Corinne Bailey Rae was last heard from during lockdown, when an unknown American producer calling himself Ritt Momney turned a digitised reworking of her early hit Put Your Records On into a chirpy TikTok favourite.
The music that the Leeds singer-songwriter was actually making during this time could not be more different. Black Rainbows is a clean break from anything she’s done before, sprinting away from her cosy early sound in numerous different directions, from the grungey venom of Erasure to the Ethiopian jazz-inspired Before the Throne of the Invisible God. It’s extraordinary.
