“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 lover-boys 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 the 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.
