The Brit pop trailblazer redefines her artistry with her debut album.
Written By Oscar Yards
There's an amusing irony in calling My 21st Century Blues a debut album. By the time RAYE released it in February 2023, she had already spent years writing hits for other artists, navigating a major-label system and attempting to convince the industry to give her the opportunity to make the record she wanted to make.
The album arrives after a very public separation from Polydor, following years in which RAYE had spoken openly and honestly about being unable to release her long awaited debut. Freed from that arrangement, My 21st Century Blues doesn’t sound like an artist cautiously stepping into her own career. It arrived bravely sounding like an artist fully formed, who's no longer asking for permission to speak.
the album artwork immediately establishes that conflict.
A younger RAYE stands precariously on a pile of instruments, while a group of suited men who seem to be representing the executives of the industry she is confronting are crushed beneath them. Hands reach upwards towards her as she attempts to balance in a pair of oversized red heels, just one of the many pairs of shoes she's been forced to wear throughout her career.
The image is a visual thesis for the record. Her heels are too big and the industry beneath her is unstable, yet she is still standing.
My 21st Century Blues album artwork. Creative Direction by Mikey Robbins; photography by Callum Walker Hutchinson. Image courtesy of Human Re Sources.
That sense of performance runs throughout RAYE’s story. After entering the music industry as a teenager, she spent years being presented in ways that didn’t reflect the artist that she wanted to become. Her image, sound and career were repeatedly being shaped around expectations that existed outside of her control.
Musically, RAYE refuses to replace one box with another. Jazz, soul, R&B, pop, hip-hop and electronic production sit alongside one another without the album ever sounding like an exercise of genre. Hard Out Here, Escapism. and Environmental Anxiety occupy completely different spaces, yet they share the same willingness to be direct and embody an experimental, alternative sound that surprisingly RAYE owns with cadence.
Throughout the tracks RAYE treats her voice less like a traditional pop melody line and more like a percussive instrument. By varying her vocal pocket and speeding up through systemic critiques, slowing down for heavy, soul infused declarations she bends alternative and experimental sonic palettes into something truly and uniquely hers. And RAYE isn’t interested in smoothing the edges off difficult subjects. Sex, addiction, climate anxiety, exploitation, heartbreak and the contradictions of modern womanhood clearly express themselves alongside the glamour and spectacle. The album can be brutally intimate one moment and incredibly expressive the next.
There is an extraordinary amount of detail packed into My 21st Century Blues. RAYE treats the album less like a collection of singles and more like a complete piece of work despite most of the songs being vaulted for years before the album was made. Its sequencing, production and lyrical content contribute to a larger portrait of an artist reclaiming authorship over her own story.
Image courtesy of Human Re Sources and RAYE.
RAYE has always had the technical ability to justify the attention around her, but the album demonstrates something more interesting than vocal ability alone. She understands when to use that voice as an instrument of control and when to let it sound vulnerable, exhausted, or completely unrestrained and despite her claims, she has an unforgivable talent in rapping and spoken word that she demonstrates on Escapism., Hard Out Here., and even Flip A Switch..
And having the opportunity to see all of this translated to the stage makes the scale of her talent even clearer.
I saw RAYE’s One Night Only Symphony show at the O2, from almost the very back of the room, but that didn't matter once the performance began. It was the type of performance that makes the distance between the audience and the stage disappear and not because of spectacle alone, but because of the sheer command RAYE has over what she is doing.
There is something really satisfying in watching an artist who spent so long being told to wait, finally, take complete control of the room.
My 21st Century Blues of course is the sound of RAYE getting her debut album but Its also the sound of a generational artist finally being given the freedom to make the album she had been trying to make all along.
RAYE has spent years writing for everyone else, having song sold off to artists further into their career, while being stuck in a constant cycle of writing songs she wasn't passionate about, being forced to promote them and then being punished when they didn't perform. It is also difficult not to consider the wider systemic issues that could shape whose careers are prioritised within the music industry, although RAYE herself has not publicly attributed her treatment to any particular demographic factor. What we do know is much simpler, the industry took far too long to let RAYE make the record she had been trying to make.
and you best believe she didn’t waste the opportunity she made for herself.
[Originally published February 2023 by Oscar Yards, Edited September 2026 Original Article Here]
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