How Raye Reinvented the Pop Ballad for the TikTok Age

So much has changed in the music business over the last two decades, but one constant has been the extent to which a song can achieve ubiquity. There was a point late last year when the British singer Raye’s “Where Is My Husband” was seemingly being heard everywhere. It may have charted at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it swiftly achieved an international level of success that belied that (admittedly impressive) position, thanks to the universality of its lyric, focusing on a hunt for a spouse, and its frantic, Motown-influenced arrangement.But now that Raye has released her sophomore album “This Music May Contain Hope,” it seems quite clear that she is not interested in being the next Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin, but instead a balladeer without equal. Adele, pack your trousseau; Lana del Rey, put your red party dress back in the closet. The 28-year- old South Londoner has set up camp in your multi-million selling territory. Few would bet against her becoming the next global sensation.This comes despite (or perhaps because of) “This Music May Contain Hope” being one of the most eccentric releases that pop music has seen in years, perhaps even decades. Raye self-funded and released the album herself on the independent label Human Re Sources, and without any of the interfering input of a major label, it represents a gloriously unhinged melting pot of ideas and influences. Her flair for the dramatic begins with the album and song titles, and then carries on into the remainder of the record, indicating a love of theatricality that is — let us be honest — comparatively rare in a straight woman in her twenties.As demonstrated by “Where Is My Husband,” she has a deep love of Sixties girl group music. But there is plenty more to be found here, whether it’s hip-hop, house, Édith Piaf infused chanson, or jazz. By the time that the dramatic Hans Zimmer collaboration “Click Clack Symphony,” an ode to feminine solidarity post break-up, comes in, complete with Sturm und Drang orchestral arrangement that is the kind of thing that you would imagine accompanying the next Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve picture, it is clear that Raye has staked out territory that none of her peers are coming close to.Raye. Kate Green/Getty ImagesThis does not necessarily make it a flawless album. It’s an hour and a quarter long, and drenched in self-indulgence throughout. (Did it really need a closing track, “Fin,” in which Raye dutifully thanks everyone who has performed on the record? Given that it includes the entirety of the London Symphony Orchestra, this is a lot of names to get through.) Yet self-indulgence often makes for a more interesting listening experience than the bland professionalism that has been cluttering up Spotify playlists and the Billboard charts alike for years, complete with autotuned vocals, identikit producers, and songwriters segueing from project to project without supplying any personal investment in any of them.Raye, in all her bleeding-heart-on-sleeve sincerity, represents somethingnew, painful, and vital. Comparisons will of course be made with another Londoner, in the form of Amy Winehouse, whose brief journey from jazz singer to tormented icon to corpse in the space of 27 years turned her into an icon. Raye may be lovelorn — in the style of many other singers before and since — but she radiates a rather more positive attitude than the deeply miserable Winehouse, whose short and troubled life has turned her into one of the so-called “27 Club” of dead artists who lived fast and died young at that tender age.That “This Music May Contain Hope” is going to be a more upbeat listen is made clear from its second song, the Piaf-homage “I Will Overcome,” which explicitly alludes to Winehouse (“it’s funny, some people say I remind them of Amy”) but then declares, “I’ll play Édith Piaf, and I’ll dance, and I’ll eat chocolate cake, and I’ll have no regrets.” This is heartbreak, 2026 style, a million miles away from the bleakness of Winehouse’s “Back to Black.”Raye. Gareth Cattermole/Getty ImagesStill, Raye’s phenomenal voice needs at least one skyscraping showcase for its full octave-spanning glory and it finds it on the album’s second single, the phenomenal ballad “Nightingale Lane,” in which she places herself amongst the rarefied peers, not just of today, but of bygone eras too. Introduced, perhaps unnecessarily, with the spoken word statement that “this is a song about the greatest heartbreak I have ever known,” its impact comes from the tension between the relative banality of being let down by a lover in London and the soul-aching torment that romantic disappointment brings about.By the time that the song — backed, I should add, in full dramatic splendor by the LSO — reaches its final crescendo, Raye, channeling Lorraine Ellison and Dionne Warwick, declares “Someone once loved me, and someday, someone will again.” In its soaring universality, she manages to out-Adele Adele, the other London singer whose similarly dramatic (although rather less orchestrated) paean to lost love, “Someone Like You,” turned her into an international star. In fact, the closest comparison is with that French-Canadian star Celine Dion, who might not be a fashionable figure in the way that Raye is, but whose eagerly awaited comeback gigs this fall in Paris demonstrate there is still an appetite for big power balladeers doing their thing with suitable chutzpah.Yet Ms. Dion is redolent of the 1980s and 1990s. It is now Raye, in all her unrestrained glory, who stakes out new and hitherto uncharted territory, of the epic, dramatic ballad aimed at those who spend half their lives on Instagram and the other half on TikTok, and who therefore need something properly original to divert themselves from their doom-scrolling and selfie-taking. We have come at last to such an artist, and we are all the richer for it.

How Raye Reinvented the Pop Ballad for the TikTok Age

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