Raye’s ‘This Tour May Contain New Music’ at Radio City: Concert Review

If there were ever truth in advertising, it can be found in the poster for Raye’s sensory-overload “This Tour May Contain New Music”: “This tour may also contain: dramatic endings, a brass section, live & passion, at least on jazz cover, potential waffling (excessive unnecessary chatting), a big belted note, a nightclub segment, live strings and a musical hug should you need one.”  

She brought exactly that Thursday night at the second of two sold-out shows at the art-deco orgasm of New York’s legendarily opulent Radio City Music Hall, which provided a perfect old-school showbiz setting for the concert: She opened with a blazing version of “Where Is My Husband?,” the lead single from her latest album, “This Music May Contain Hope,” and from there it was two and a half hours of full-on Raye, accompanied by a 20-piece mini-orchestra in tuxes, with all of her charisma, humor, sky-splitting belting and kaleidoscopic combination of musical genres, which somehow segued smoothly between big-band, pop, R&B, ballads, a cover of the classic “Fly Me to the Moon,” a giant orchestral moment with the Hans Zimmer arrangement of “Click Clack Symphony,” and, at the end, a full-on electronic dance segment.

The evening was a family affair, as well: Her younger sisters, who perform under the names Amma and Absolutely and are powerful singers themselves, each performed a short set — Amma’s pop-leaning, Absolutely’s more complex and experimental, with a break for a slow cover of ABBA’s “I Have a Dream” — and toward the end of the evening they joined sister Raye for “Joy,” as they do on the new album.

But for her own set, Raye is the sun around which everything else revolves. She soared through songs from both of her albums, leaning heavily on the new one but only loosely following its involved storyline. There was a lively video screen behind the stage and occasional props, including tables with lamps brought out for a jazzy sit-down segment, but nothing to distract from the star. We first saw her at the 575-capacity Bowery Ballroom in 2023, and while she’s always been a powerful live performer, she finally has a stage and a setting big enough to match her ambition.

Yet even amid such a busy show, the focus is always on Raye’s singing voice: She is a marvel of nature, moving between soft and sultry to multisyllabic near-rapping to full-on belting so effortlessly that it’s like watching an Olympic gymnast perform: It’s actually rather astonishing to see someone talk so much yet still hold a soaring, extremely difficult high note for around 30 seconds — at the end of a 150-minute-long show, no less.

Indeed, as advertised, Raye talks to the audience so much — and is so warm and hilarious — that her banter is a show in itself. She complimented audience members on their outfits (including one way up in the top balcony), asked a young girl in the balcony to choose which bandmember should solo (communicating via hand signals), and introduced her band twice and asked the audience to applaud for them at least five times. At another point, after holding up jokey signs that read “Applause please” and “More!,” she reminded everyone of her status as an outspoken independent artist by holding up a final sign with a QR code for purchasing the album.

Yet her monologue also got very serious during segments of the show where she spoke about heartbreak, and especially during “Ice Cream Man,” which is about being sexually assaulted at what she thought was an audition — in an especially sobering moment, Raye said statistics show that one in four women have suffered some form of sexual abuse, and asked the audience to imagine “one in four of those beautiful, radiant faces” in the audience as living with that experience.

But also as promised, the show was all about joy, optimism and self-belief, and if her monologues occasionally veered into self-care exhortations, that was perfectly on brand as well. And as the show wound down, it charged full force into a segment that was a near polar opposite of the cocktail jazzy elements from earlier in the evening: a pulsating ten-minute EDM set called the “Nightclub Medley,” complete with bright green lasers sweeping over the audience. A rousing version of “Joy” followed, and then the closer “Escapism,” which Raye halted a couple of times just to bask in the cheers of the audience.

“New York, this is one of the most amazing moments of my life,” she said through tears before laughing, “Don’t tell Night One!”