Raye — the 28-year-old south Londoner who put her name in lights with songs about heartbreak, loss and longing — has an announcement to make. “My third album, I think I’ve named it already,” she says. “It’s going to be called And Then She Fell in Love. And I’m not writing a single song — be it one year, five years, ten years — until that chapter of my life begins.”
Fans may be forced to matchmake. More than 56 million people stream Raye’s music on Spotify every month — her 2023 single Escapism has been played more than a billion times. Her second album, This Music May Contain Hope, was released in March and is at the time of writing No 1. Collaborators have included Al Green, Mark Ronson and the Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. Earlier this year she won her first Grammy, for her song Ice Cream Man.
She was texting a man for a bit — but it was the 68-year-old Zimmer (“in May last year, casually, I sent a text to Hans and said, ‘Hey, I have this song I’ve been working on, and I just think it needs you to be part of it,’ ” she says). Given that she is midway through a continent-spanning 51-date tour, which started in Poland in January and ends in May at the O2 in London, when’s a girl to hit Hinge? Perhaps a career hiatus in the name of love may be required, even if it breaks a lot of hearts. “That’s my silent protest,” she says, giggling.
Love is fickle but it’s not as fickle as the music industry, which is something Raye may know better than most artists. In 2014, aged 17, she signed a four-album deal with Polydor Records off the strength of her self-released 2014 EP, Welcome to the Winter. But by 2021 she still hadn’t put out an album. She had been working — writing songs for artists such as Beyoncé and Charli XCX, providing vocals for dance musicians including David Guetta and Jax Jones, and releasing dance-based singles with Polydor — but the label wasn’t backing her to put out an album in her own name.
Aliyah Otchere
By 2021 the golden handcuffs arrangement had taken her to breaking point: she was self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, obsessing that her career was over before it had begun. In June 2021 she decided to press the nuclear button. “I have been on a 4 ALBUM RECORD DEAL since 2014. And haven’t been allowed to put out one album,” she tweeted to her then 50,000 followers. “I’m done being a polite pop star. I want to make my album now, please that is all that I want.” The post went viral as other musicians weighed in with their own stories of record label mismanagement. Polydor released her — calling the split “amicable” — and in 2023 Raye put out her debut album, My 21st Century Blues. It went to No and was nominated for the Mercury prize. The big swing paid off.
On Instagram (4.7 million followers), celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, Reese Witherspoon and Shawn Mendes leave emojis under her posts; Taylor Swift, whom Raye supported on the Eras tour two summers ago, goes to her gigs. In 2024 she won six Brit awards — the most Brits any artist has won in a single ceremony — and last year she played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
Raye’s biggest song of 2025 was Where Is My Husband! It features on the new album, as do two songs about toxic boys: Beware The South London Lover Boy, which has a brio reminiscent of early Lily Allen, and The WhatsApp Shakespeare.
Raye at the 2024 Brit awards, where she won a record-breaking six BritsGETTY IMAGES
With Taylor Swift in Los Angeles last monthGetty images
“I have pushed myself as hard as I can and could have in the last two years,” she says. “If I’m not on stage, I’ve been working on this album. I think we’re in an age where you can feel like if you stop then no one’s going to care, or it’s all going to be over. And because I have worked so bloody hard to get to this point, part of you is, like, ‘Feed the machine. Feed the beast.’ ” She now works as an independent artist with a tiny team. “We meet in my living room.”
Rachel Agatha Keen was born in Tooting, southwest London, in 1997 — Raye is a nickname, a riff on the first syllable of Rachel and a stage name she started using when she became a musician. She grew up nearby in Croydon. Her mother, Sarah, is a Ghanaian-Swiss former NHS mental health worker and her dad, Paul, a songwriter and producer from Yorkshire. On her wrist Raye has tattooed three flags: Ghana, Switzerland and the Union Jack. Her first taste of music was in her local Pentecostal church choir, where Sarah sang and Paul was the musical director — he used to teach Raye to play songs of worship on the piano after Sunday services. (The family would also tune into The X Factor every week.)
She wrote her first songs at primary school and aged 13 started noodling around on Apple’s GarageBand software, which is around the time her parents started to twig they might have a talent on their hands. The following year she won a place at the Brit School — the pop star talent factory that has produced Adele, Amy Winehouse, Lola Young and Olivia Dean — but after two years dropped out, feeling confined by the prescriptive lessons in songwriting. Instead, after getting her record deal, she started spending weekends in studios and on songwriting camps with stars including Rihanna, learning how to write on the job.
Raye’s shows are gloriously theatrical — a big band, a bevy of backing singers, the singer dressed like a golden-age Hollywood starlet. Off stage she is undimmed. When we speak it is the week of her album release and she’s deep in rehearsals for a gig in California, the first date of her North America tour, but there’s no weariness to talk shop. She answers questions in low, throaty south London tones and tells stories that often end in a giggle. Her preferred curse word is “flipping” (at least when she’s speaking to a journalist). She is steeped in the rubric of music — talking bridges and outros and round choruses. After briefly outlining the mechanics of Click Clack Symphony, her new song with Zimmer, she becomes animated. “I can’t even believe he’s on my album. It’s ridiculous. Life, right? Life is wild.”
As a childX / RAYE
Gen Z is drawn to her music because it plumbs the lows, scales the highs, meets the tough stuff eye-to-eye: addiction, body dysmorphia, meaningless sex, bad experiences from her early youth when she was a child in the music industry’s adult world. Her 2023 song Ice Cream Man, which won the Grammy, recounts her own experiences of being sexually assaulted, including by a music producer. But she also writes catchy songs about messy nights out: Escapism, her first No single, is an R&B, electro-pop mash-up about a late-night mission to get over someone by getting under someone else.
More from the Young Power List
The new album skips between R&B, soul, pop and soaring symphonies; from music to weep quietly to, to witty earworms that make you want to sing along.
“There was a thing I saw on Twitter the other day,” she says. “Someone was, like, ‘Raye loves to put out a hit and then release a flipping jazz song that no one cares about.’ And it was so funny because I was, like, this is so accurate.”
A decade in, two albums under her belt, “I think if anything is shifting, it’s The Man has less power — not needing a gatekeeper or a CEO to tell you yes or no, someone you have to suck up to or be on the good side of,” she says. “Nowadays you could spend a million pounds trying to push a single, but if people don’t like it, they don’t like it. You can’t force-feed things down people’s throats any more.”
In London in 2016PA
Notwithstanding the droves of bucket-hatted, gently run-to-seed millennials who turned out to see Oasis last year — for most music fans these days, boys (or men) in bands are not the story right now. Raye, Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, Olivia Dean … it is young women writing the soundtracks to lives. “I think women have always been doing that,” she says. “When I look back through history, my favourite artists are women — Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, Dinah Washington — women killing it in the 1960s.” But women dominating the charts does not mean music is now “fixed”. There’s “a long way to go. We like to feel like we’ve changed, but the same old stuff is happening behind the scenes, the same power imbalances, women wanting to be taken as seriously as men. We know that.”
Her three younger sisters, Abby, Lauren and Katelyn, are musicians too (Abby and Lauren are supporting her on tour, under the stage names Absolutely and Amma). The difference from Raye’s earliest days is that all of them are managed by her parents. It sounds quaintly old-school, like a travelling family band. “It just works,” she says. “They work really hard and believe in us. It would be really flipping hard without my parents. My dad is so good at a pep talk.” Does she ever feel tempted to … rebel? “No. I love it that way. I need it that way.”
Raye, right, with her sisters Abby, top, and LaurenPAUL KEEN / INSTAGRAM
Her parents, Sarah and Paul PAUL KEEN / INSTAGRAM
This might be partly because, like a lot of stars who grew up online, Raye is attuned to criticism. Several times she refers, obliquely, to a line from a review of her album that landed hours before we speak. “I’m terrified of people picking me apart and eating me alive. At the end of the day not everyone’s going to love it but I know somebody out there will.”
She stays off the internet as much as she can and looks for answers in a Bible app, not cruising Instagram. During her darkest days at Polydor, misusing drugs and alcohol, she credited her Christian faith with getting her through. “I think since I’ve come offline it’s been much better. Ignorance is bliss. If someone said I look awful in a dress, it’d make me sad. If I don’t know someone said I look awful in a dress …” She is laughing now. “So I’m really [big] on being offline.” I wonder how she guards her privacy in real life. “It’s taken me so long to get here, I’d be terrified to jeopardise all of that by giving someone a bad impression of me,” she says. “So I’ll always say hello.” Accidentally skipping a family in the queue at a Nando’s inspired a mild meltdown. “I didn’t say, ‘I’m really sorry,’ ” she says. “And for the next 48 hours it was all I could think about. That’s the kind of brain I have — it will eat me alive if I make someone even a tiny bit upset.”
She is sending herself up, but this sounds exhausting. “Potentially that impacts how often I leave the house. Because my brain cannot reckon with leaving a bad impression — I just can’t handle it. I need to talk to my therapist about it, maybe.”
At a concert with Mark Ronson in New York last yearStar Max
Raye has a home in Streatham, where she lives with Abby and Lauren, and a six-bedroom, £2 million mansion in Los Angeles. She has worn Fendi to the Met Gala and attended shows at Paris Fashion Week (she Lime-bikes between front rows). She spent her first pay cheque on a gold Volkswagen Beetle. But she doesn’t seem to have much time to play with the trappings of pop stardom. She’s on the road a lot, or writing, or in the studio. “I’m so excited for the shows but it is also a lot of hard work — so I’m really excited to hopefully get to a place where maybe I can implement a little balance, because I’m craving just being a human for a little bit. D’you know what I mean?” Perhaps a week on a beach? “Do you know what I’d like to do? Go backpacking for a month.”
There will be no disappearing act quite yet (be it to interrail across Europe or find the romantic muse for album three). With This Music May Contain Hope, “I still have things I want to change, things that I wish I could edit, things that I’m still not actually a thousand per cent happy with, but you just have to let it go.” It’s all in the name of the long career she feared was slipping away when she was a faceless vocalist for hire, writing hits for other people to sing. “These are the songs I’m going to be performing on stage for the rest of my life. And I wanted to create music that I wanted to perform on stage for the rest of my life.”
This Music May Contain Hope is out now