Raye: My 21st Century Blues album review - a magnificently furious debut from the Brit Awards frontrunner

Now that she’s free of the restrictions placed on her by her major label, the singer is letting rip
Raye
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David Smyth25 January 2024

A full six years since I reviewed her in this paper as the next big thing in British pop, here it is: the debut album Rachel “Raye” Keen said she wasn’t allowed to release.

In the summer of 2021, the south Londoner appeared on Twitter in tears, taking the potentially foolhardy step of publicly criticising the major record label to which she had been signed for the last seven years. “I’ve done everything they asked me, I switched genres,” she said of Polydor, the company which seemed to feel that she wasn’t a safe bet as a solo act when her biggest hits to that point had all been collaborations with better known men: David Guetta, Jax Jones, D-Block Europe.

“I’m done being a polite pop star,” she added, surely smarting from watching similar singers such as Mabel, Anne-Marie and Jess Glynne moving from providing guest vocals on dance-pop singles to achieving hit solo albums. It may have been inadvertent, but by revealing her suppression she has given herself a story that sets her apart from all the others and makes this collection a vital listen.

Now releasing her music as an independent artist, she’s a woman scorned, and that fury comes over magnificently in the opening one-two of Oscar Winning Tears and Hard Out Here. The former is a bombastic two fingers to a man who was “a one out of 10”, the latter a tongue-twisting strut that sees her taking foul-mouthed aim at “All the white men CEOs, f*** your privilege/Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth, f*** you think this is?”

Naggingly catchy radio pop is still the format, but with honesty now her USP, she goes to some difficult places. Mary Jane is a smouldering blues ballad about substance abuse. On the bluntly titled Body Dysmorpia she explores self-loathing around her appearance, without adding the usual message that everyone is beautiful just as they are. The hardest listen is Ice Cream Man, which concerns what appear to be multiple experiences of sexual assault throughout her life. Venting this time, at least, leaves her more empowered: “I’m a very f***ing brave strong woman/And I’ll be damned if I let men ruin/How I walk, how I talk, how I do it,” she repeats over a minimal, melancholy backing.

It’s impossible for the listener not to root for her, especially when the drums crash in on Escapism, the number one single that confirmed her comeback. “Today I feel like a toilet,” she wrote that miserable summer. How far she has come.

Human Re-Sources

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