RAYE’s maximalist masterpiece is the hope we need

RAYE names Amy Winehouse and Edith Piaf as her artistic predecessors on the opening tracks of new album This Music May Contain Hope. Both died young, undone by the same darkness they sang about, and placing them there reads as a dare to herself. The album that follows is her attempt to find a different ending: a 17-track, 75-minute work featuring Al Green, Hans Zimmer, the London Symphony Orchestra, and over 80 collaborators, structured around the four seasons as a journey from autumn despair toward summer light.

Every genre shift on the record, from Vivaldi's Winter to post-bop jazz combo to gospel choir, serves that arc: small emotional truths get cinematic treatment, most strikingly when the click of heels on pavement becomes the central rhythm of an anthem about getting dressed to go out with friends. The episode serves as a field guide to the album's vast musical language, and to the argument that hope is something you have to build, genre by genre, track by track.

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• RAYE – "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" 
• Nat King Cole – "Let There Be Love" 
• Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong – "Summertime" 
• RAYE (ft. 070 Shake ) – "Escapism." 
• RAYE – "Intro: Girl Under the Grey Cloud." 
• RAYE – "I Will Overcome." 
• Edith Piaf – "La Vie en Rose" 
• RAYE – "Nightingale Lane." 
• RAYE – "Fin." 
• RAYE – "The WhatsApp Shakespeare." 
• Mark Ronson & RAYE – "Suzanne" 
• RAYE – "I Hate The Way I Look Today." 
• RAYE – "Winter Woman." 
• Vivaldi – "The Four Seasons: Winter" 
• RAYE (ft. Hans Zimmer) – "Click Clack Symphony." 
• RAYE (ft. Al Green) – "Goodbye Henry." 
• Al Green – "Love and Happiness" 
• Aretha Franklin – "Rock Steady" 
• RAYE – "Skin & Bones." 
• Fred Wesley and The J.B.'s (ft. James Brown) – "Damn Right I Am Somebody" 
• RAYE – "Beware.. The South London Lover Boy." 
• The Supremes – "You Can't Hurry Love" 
• Iggy Pop – "Lust for Life" Jet – "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" 
• Mark Ronson (ft. Amy Winehouse) – "Valerie" 
• Charles Albert Tindley – "I'll Overcome Someday" 
• Prince - “Purple Rain" 
• Beyoncé – "Love on Top" 
• RAYE (ft. Amma & Absolutely) – "Joy."

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