A certain contender for end of the year lists, this is an album of rare scale and energy, one that’s been designed to come back to time and time again

When Rachel Keen aka Raye released her debut album in 2023, all the talk was about how she’d been forced to break free of her contract with Polydor, who’d refused to release it. If that album was the sound of an artist breaking free of her contractual chains, This Music May Contain Hope is that very same artist repeating the trick while turning everything up to 11.

There’s an awful lot to take in regarding Raye’s second album. It’s 17 tracks long, with a running time of 73 minutes. Like its predecessor, My 21st Century Blues, it skips through genres at a dizzying rate, includes orchestral ballads, spoken word interludes, brass-laden pop songs and loud club bangers. It begins with Raye narrating a story about a young woman walking around Paris, and ends with her thanking every single person by name who worked on the album. For six and a half minutes. It is, as they say, a LOT.