<\/p>\n
How satisfying has it been to witness the transformation of Rachel Agatha Keen?<\/b><\/p>\n
Five years ago, the singer – better known as Raye – made a bid for freedom, cutting ties with record label who’d forced her to make generic dance tracks she dismissed as “really boring”.<\/p>\n
Liberated from those constraints, her emotionally-charged, instantly catchy debut album My 21st Century Blues showcased an artist of remarkable depth.<\/p>\n
Powered by singles like Escapism and Oscar Winning Tears, it won a record-breaking six Brit Awards, including album of the year, which resulted in Raye “ugly crying on national television”.<\/p>\n
So how do you follow that up?<\/p>\n
Speaking to the BBC last year, she admitted to a momentary crisis of confidence.<\/p>\n
“When you haven’t written for a long time, you start being extremely self-critical. So I was hating everything I was coming out with,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I think the pressure is always going to be there, no matter what. But the luxurious thing now is that the pressure comes from me – because that wasn’t the case in the past.”<\/p>\n
That anecdote tells you a great deal about This Music May Contain Hope, a concept album about overcoming heartbreak and self-doubt and internet trolls and stupid men.<\/p>\n
Rather than surrender to those setbacks, Raye saddles up and sets off in search of happiness. Musically-speaking, she comes out swinging.<\/p>\n
“There’s a thing I miss in in pop music today, which is that kind of Motown feeling, that classic feeling, that analogue feeling,” she told me last year. “So I was really excited to really, really experiment with that quite vividly.”<\/p>\n
The spirit of old-school jazz, blues, big band and soul inhabits the record, which stretches out over 71 minutes, as Raye flexes her compositional muscles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.bbc.co.uk \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How satisfying has it been to witness the transformation of Rachel Agatha Keen? Five years ago, the singer – better known as Raye – made a bid for freedom, cutting ties with record label who’d forced her to make generic dance tracks she dismissed as “really boring”. Liberated from those constraints, her emotionally-charged, instantly catchy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2353568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2353567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Raye-comes-out-swinging-on-her-new-album-This-Music.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2353567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2353569,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353567\/revisions\/2353569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2353568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2353567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2353567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2353567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}