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- Mar 27, 2026‘This Music May Contain Hope’ is RAYE firing on all cylinders – and then some. It’s showstopping musical maximalism at its grandest, while still being grounded in relatable experiences and unbridled emotions.
- Mar 23, 2026It’s huge, expansive, bonkers and brilliant. It’s RAYE at her very core, and it’s fantastic.
- Mar 23, 2026Her appetite for the heart-on-sleeve razzle dazzle of it all is glorious. This Music May Contain Hope is a pure audio spectacle that will have you screaming for an encore.
- Mar 30, 2026There’s a lot to take in — orchestras and choirs and horns and, occasionally, driving beats — but most impressive throughout is the ringleader, Raye herself, not just for bringing this jumbo jet of a project in for a safe landing, but most of all as a songwriter and singer: She purrs and belts and soars; some of her melodies and lyrics are so fast and polysyllabic they’d be tongue-twisters if spoken by the average person, but she reels them off with the ease of an Olympic athlete.
- Mar 27, 2026This Music May Contain Hope will easily be a certain contender for many people’s end of the year lists. This is an album of rare scale and energy, and one that’s been designed to come back to time and time again.
- Mar 27, 2026She packs it full of old-school show-tune razzle-dazzle, big-band swing frills, retro Sixties R&B, the occasional club beat, and an endless supply of glamorously tragic scenarios. .... Self-indulgence is the whole point of This Music May Contain Hope, and the album wouldn’t work at all without her flamboyant grandiosity.
- Apr 9, 2026The attention to detail is pretty confounding, from the string and brass arrangements to her imagery-laden lyrics; as RAYE balances vintage styles with modern-leaning melodies and production, she strikes a sound that is unmistakably hers and totally infectious.
- Mar 26, 2026Like it or not – I very much do – this is not an artist playing it safe. As on the last album, RAYE is unequivocally at her best when she leans contemporary, in production and subject matter.
- Mar 23, 2026Problems arise with I know You’re Hurting and Life Boat, a combined 10 minutes the album could arguably do without. The same could be said for the five minutes of thank you credits in Fin. Where the hell is my editor? might have been a more apt battle cry. Still, given its emotional heft and likely cultural impact, it’s an album that could turn Raye into Britain’s Beyoncé. It’s a towering achievement.
- Mar 27, 2026Raye is refreshingly unconcerned with sounding corny. On This Music May Contain Hope, maximalism proves to be an effective cure for the loneliness epidemic.
- Apr 1, 2026The frequent spoken-word interludes would feel less performative at a live show, but often take you out of the moment on the record. It seems RAYE is unwilling to leave anything on the cutting room floor, even if dialing back the razzle-dazzle could forge closer connection to the music. But the peaks often justify the adventure.
- Mar 23, 2026It is wildly ambitious, in a pop era in which a lot of artists’ ambitions extend no further than maintaining their career. But the end result feels less like a showstopping grand artistic statement than a wild, fascinating, occasionally messy miscellany of ideas.
