RAYE: IN FULL CONTROL

Having shaken off the shackles of a seven-year contract without a debut record, Raye is savouring a number-one single and the freedom that comes with dropping her long-awaited first album, as she tells Rolling Stone UK

- LAUREN O'NEILL

SOMETIMES IT’S GOOD to start at the end. On the final song of Raye’s debut album My 21st Century Blues. finally due out on 3rd February, after holdups that delayed her from releasing a full-length record for the best part of a decade she speaks directly to the listener over a gently swirling piano riff. I’ve waited seven years for this moment,” she says. And My 21st Century Blues. is now ours, forever.”

It’s a poignant conclusion to an extremely hard-won triumph. At only 25, Raye, born Rachel Agatha Keen in Tooting, south London, is already a music industry veteran, and in her time she has seen the underbelly of the machine first-hand. Aged 17, she signed a four-album deal with Polydor, but in early 2022, following years of being creatively stifled, she publicly broke from the label indeed, by the end of their arrangement, Raye had still not been allowed to release an album).

Freedom as an independent artist under the distribution company Human Re Sources followed. By late December, when Raye and I speak, her decision to break ties is completely vindicated: her song Escapism’, featuring 070 Shake, which was released in October and became an unexpectedly slow-burning TikTok hit, has just reached number two in the UK charts coming in only behind Mariah’s perennial end-of-year smash All I Want for Christmas Is You’), and number one in Ireland. In January, it topped the UK chart.