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There was a brilliant moment on one of the last Graham Norton Show episodes of 2025. “Your mother named you ‘Absolutely’?” a concerned-sounding Matthew McConaughey asked the fast-rising alt-pop singer, who was sitting alongside Dwayne Johnson and her big sisters RAYE and Amma. Chaos descended as she clarified that Absolutely was a stage name, prompting McConaughey to enquire as to its origins. “Tequila,” Johnson joked.
Primetime television spots are still a relatively new phenomenon for the artist born Abby-Lynn Keen. Today, I find her sitting in a quiet room backstage at her label offices; she jumps up to greet me with a hug as I walk in, her hair a mass of scarlet locks piled high on top of her head. A pair of knee-high suede boots are placed at one end of the sofa, a groaning rack of wardrobe options on the other. I interviewed Keen’s big sister Rachel, the pop star we know and love as RAYE, back when she was around 19, two years younger than Keen is now. It’s striking to see her up close – the family resemblance is impossible to miss. Born to a Swiss-Ghanaian mother and English father, they share the same high forehead, strong jaw, and almond-shaped, liquid brown eyes that seem to reach into your very soul. Both sisters have the capacity to disarm, in different ways: RAYE is wonderfully brash and bold, a chatterbox, while Keen is so shy I find myself talking more gently, out of fear of startling her.
The times when I was letting those voices cut through were the times I was most stagnant, creatively
We’re here because Keen is about to play her second album, Paracosm, to a small group of writers, critics and tastemakers. I was sent an advance stream and already adore it: it’s a taut, confident, beautifully realised 11-track journey spanning pop, electronic, R&B and soul, in which she explores themes of heartbreak, identity and resilience. She started working on it as soon as her first album – 2023’s Cerebrum – was done, but it’s been through a number of iterations. There were also two occasions where her hard drive crashed and wiped all her files… apparently, misadventure when it comes to music runs in the family. RAYE told her followers last year that someone had stolen her car, containing notebooks filled with songs earmarked for her upcoming second album (fortunately, she was able to retrieve both the car and those precious notebooks).
“It had three different titles, three different concepts,” Keen tells me. She ultimately went with Paracosm, a term for an imaginary world – often starting in childhood – that expands and changes in the mind of the individual throughout adulthood. She’s a big Tim Burton fan, which explains the fantastical darkness you see in her fashion and artwork choices. Freedom proved to be another big theme coursing through this record: “Freedom from the perception of others, freedom to express myself, freedom from fear,” she recites, almost like a mantra. She’s used to having to battle with people’s preconceptions: “The times when I was letting those voices cut through were the times I was most stagnant, creatively. I was stuck for months because I was focusing so much on what people would think, worrying if we were making something that would get on the radio, or that people would understand.”
Fortunately, Keen has some experience when it comes to writing hits. She began songwriting “just for fun” when she was 13, and would create “multiple songs a day” in the family’s back garden and then come up with beats for them after school. It proved to be a positive outlet; she was a shy child, too, and music was a way of expressing herself. Then, aged 16 and stuck in lockdown, she signed a publishing deal and found herself on video calls with other songwriters and producers. It was a steep learning curve: “I had to record myself and learn how to produce,” she recalls. She scored co-writes on tracks released by David Guetta, Anitta and Normani and continues to crop up in the credits for more recent output by Teddy Swims, Nao and Mahalia.
In between those successes, the time came for her own artistic identity to take shape. She chose the name Absolutely because it sounded decisive and definitive, but also because “it’s kind of just random and weird, like if somebody asks, ‘Hey, what music are you listening to?’ ‘Absolutely.’” She teamed up with a producer she admired, Dave Hamelin, known for his work with her favourite artist – the rapper and singer 070 Shake – and who also produced several songs on Beyoncé’s 2024 album, Cowboy Carter.
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Absolutely: ‘Definitely in the studio, I have to work a little harder to assert myself’ (Press)
A number of the songs on Paracosm seem to address Keen’s own conflicting feelings about entering the spotlight. The waltzing single “No Audience”, which opens with a flurry of wintry harmonies, finds her dreaming wistfully of performing to an empty theatre (“Nobody watching, wouldn’t that be freer?”), before the chorus: “Anything you decide, you can make it real life/ Don’t think, don’t fear, just be, just flow/ Like a house on a hill, can’t be hidden like you wish it will/ When you’re alone, it’s there you’ll glow.” On “Nowhere to Hide”, over juddering beats, she sings of releasing herself from all her insecurities and going back to that childhood sense of abandon. “Helium” lifts her up with arpeggiating piano notes, ascending to a state of true clarity. I ask what she’s floating above in the song, and she smiles. “Well, sometimes when you’re on the ground and looking at everything around you, it might look daunting. But when you’re above, you can see things from a different perspective.” She sings: “Why should I consider what you should say/ When you can’t even see what I’m seeing?” The opinions of others can get in her head, she tells me, “so I have to rise above the situation”.
I wonder if some of these lyrics were inspired by real-life conversations she had in the music industry. “It’s more an overall feeling I needed to express,” she answers carefully. “Definitely in the studio, I have to work a little harder to assert myself.” That must be hard, I say, when she’s so reserved. “But I actually feel like I’m my most confident self when I’m in there, songwriting,” she says. “It’s like my natural habitat – I’m quite a boss when I’m in there.” She flashes a grin. “So I don’t think I have that much issue with it any more.”
You hear the boss side of her on “Prototype”, a slickly produced slice of electronic pop that reminds me of early Banks, with whom she toured last year, or Charli XCX. On it, Keen is commanding, imperious, as she fires back at her past detractors over sharp, crunchy beats: “I’m a limited edition/ Baby I’m a prototype/ I’m just on a different rhythm… Try to catch me, if you can/ Try to match me, but you can’t.” They’re not typical Absolutely lyrics: “They’re quite cocky, but it was cool to put that in there, to show a different side of me.”
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‘I’ve been learning from my sister and seeing the way she handles certain situations’ (Press)
It helped, although it must have been awful, too, watching RAYE navigate her own series of hurdles before breaking through with her Brit Award-winning album, My 21st Century Blues, in 2023. Before then, her former record label had seemed to peddle her as a for-rent vocalist on a smattering of top 10 singles but, she claimed, refused to let her release the music she wanted to make. After a public plea, when she was at her wits’ end, RAYE parted ways with the label and now releases music independently, to considerable success and critical praise. “I think even subconsciously, I’ve been learning from her and seeing the way she would handle situations and the way she’s so just bold in her personality,” Keen says.
Some might question whether she would be able to assert herself enough to avoid being referred to as “RAYE’s sister” for the duration of her career. I have no doubt she’ll be just fine. Listening to Paracosm, the talent is there, but more importantly, you hear the clear expression of artistic individuality. There are echoes of her sibling in her vocal register, but Keen’s voice isn’t as rich – it’s brighter, like light refracting off ripples of water, with an otherworldly quality that’s perfectly suited to her brand of alt-pop. And where RAYE’s lyrics are often hard-hitting, whether on the sexual assault survivor anthem “Ice Cream Man” or the impatient, big-band bop “Where Is My Husband?”, Keen’s are dreamy, introspective and quietly romantic.
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Absolutely (far right) on ‘The Graham Norton Show’ with sisters Amma and RAYE, and guests Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Matthew McConaughey and James Norton (BBC)
But they’re clearly a close-knit family, and there’s zero suggestion that any of the three siblings (they have another, younger sister, who’s still in school) wants to distance themselves until they’re all established in their own right. Far from it: they’re going out on tour together, along with Amma, for RAYE’s headline arena run that kicks off next month. “I’m so excited,” Keen says. “It’s going to be a beautiful experience.” Amma has just started releasing her own music, which Keen says leans into the pop and R&B side of things: “Her voice is very powerful, like, she can belt! She’s very funny too, she’s cheeky.”
While many of these songs will be making their debut on the tour, she already knows one, the stirring ballad “I Just Don’t Know You Yet”, will prove a hit with their audience. Clips of Keen singing it during the Banks tour blew up on TikTok last year, prompting fans to demand she release the full track earlier than planned. Why does she think it resonates with people so much? “I think a lot of people know that feeling of waiting and longing for their true partner,” she suggests. She was writing from experience, having been made to feel in past relationships like she was always the second option. “I was like, ‘Wait, is this my fault?’” she recalls. “I Just Don’t Know You Yet”, then, is like a psalm in which she tells herself to have hope: “I just don’t know you yet/ But I know you’ve been sent from God/ To teach me to love again/ ’Cause I think I must’ve forgot/ How to love/ And how to be loved.”
Those who sniff at the idea of manifestation might think twice when they learn that Keen is, in fact, now in a very happy relationship, with US musician Noah Urrea, whom she met during a songwriting session for another artist. They feature frequently on one another’s social channels, sharing song covers or cute clips of them dancing or cooking together. “He’s the most beautiful, special human being,” Keen says happily. “We became friends for a bit, and then he asked me on a date, and it was the best date ever.”
It’s time for the album playback, so I head out to the main room to let her get ready. I watch as she comes out and says the briefest of hellos to her audience, gets sidetracked by nerves, then flops down onto a sofa and shuffles as low as she can go, hiding as the album begins to blast from some industrial-sized speakers. Shy she may be, but she can command your attention when it matters most. A future pop star? Absolutely.
‘Paracosm’, the new album from Absolutely, is out soon; she embarks on a world tour in support of RAYE from 22 January