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When Raye was seven, she met a homeless man on her local high street. ‘Why doesn’t he have anywhere to go?’ she asked her dad, after they’d given him some spare change.‘It isn’t fair.’ Young enough to experience strong emotions without repressing them, and old enough to understand injustice, her reaction was a strong one. That day turned out to be pivotal. In the hours that followed, her dad was unable to placate her.

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Instead, Raye – whose real name is Rachel Keen – went home and wrote her very first song, which she titled 'Change Your World'. ‘I was so upset!’ she explains, although a soft smile spreads across her face when she remembers herself as a wide-eyed seven-year-old. ‘I just had to write about it.’

After that first experiment in songwriting, Raye vowed to become a musician and has never looked back. Growing up in Croydon, the prestigious Brit school (attended by Amy Winehouse and Adele) was local to her, and she landed a place when she was 14. Two years later, she decided to leave, mainly because she’d already started getting offers from major labels. Her path seemed set, and she would soon go on to become one of the most successful songwriters of her generation, amassing eight top 20 singles, and millions of monthly listeners on Spotify. Raye has written for a handful of globally recognised artists, too – John Legend, Charli XCX, Hailee Steinfeld, Madison Beer– the list goes on. And, in 2019, she wrote a track for Beyoncé’s Lion King album: more on that to come.

Now, in a north London studio 18 years after it all began, Raye is feeling good. On set, the musician is a lot of fun. She is warm and loud and effusive. She addresses everyone in the room as ‘babe’, and while having her picture taken, she dances to Dusty Springfield, every now and then breaking into cackling laughter. And to be fair, she has a lot to be happy about. The day of her Cosmopolitan cover shoot, her song Escapism has just gone to number one on TikTok’s ‘UK Hot 50’. The following week, it will become a Top 20 single, before climbing even further into the Top 10 and eventually reaching number one. This February, she will release her debut album, My 21st Century Blues. To say that it’s been along time coming is a gargantuan understatement. Of course, none of this is her first taste of success. She’s had a number of hits before, but the difference is, this time round she’s doing it as an independent artist. For the first time in her career, she’s getting to do things on her own terms.

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Some context: now 25, Raye signed her first record deal when she was 17. A handful of labels had been battling to sign her, and she eventually joined Polydor Records, home to the likes of Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and Kendrick Lamar. At the time, both parties had many reasons to celebrate. Raye may have been young, but she had grit, talent and a fierce work ethic. She signed a four-album deal and couldn’t wait to get started on her first. That was back in 2014. But seven years later, she still hadn’t released her debut album.

Taking on the system

To the outside world, Raye seemed massively successful, but behind the scenes, she was in agony. Last summer, Raye shared her story in a series of tweets to her 60,000 followers. ‘For the last seven days I have woken up crying my eyes out, not wanting to get out of bed and feeling so alone,’ she wrote. ‘These are the emotions we usually hide from social media and I have become such an expert at hiding my tears and my pain and I wanted to talk about it today.’ She detailed all the ways in which she felt she had been exploited by her label for years: how they reportedly refused to let her release an album, and how she was made to change genres while ‘albums on albums of music sat in folders collecting dust’. ‘I’m done being a polite pop star,’ she said.

For years, Raye had strived to prove herself so that her label would allow her to put out an album, but the green light never came. Instead, she released a handful of EPs while consistently collaborating with other artists as a songwriter or vocalist. Beautiful and introspective, her early releases straddled R&B and pop, showcasing her ingenuity as an artist. Meanwhile, her collaborations tended to be club-facing pop songs, such as 'You Don’t Know Me' with Jax Jones and a handful of others.

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Gilet, Silvia Astore; shorts, Raquette; earrings, By Alona; silver ring, Ateliersó; resin band, Ejing Zhang; shoes, Koi

These tracks tended to reduce Raye to an auto-tuned vocal, but they charted high, had lots of radio play and led to regular songwriting gigs for the likes of Rita Ora and Mabel. Yet, when it came to Raye’s own music – the chance to use her own voice– the label were stifling. ‘I was being asked to write with some of the most incredible artists in the world,’ she says. ‘Meanwhile, I’m not taken seriously enough to govern and navigate my own success. What more did I have to do to prove myself? I did everything I could, and I still wasn’t enough.

‘Releasing music that says nothing means nothing... that was never why I decided to become an artist in the first place,’ she continues. ‘I found myself building a narrative I never wanted to build.’ When I ask her what that looked like, she pauses.

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When she speaks again, it’s with a deadpan irony. ‘I make simple digestible music. I’m disposable. A rent-a-voice vocal that can be hired when needed for a big moment in chart music.’

The control her label exerted had a growing impact on her mental health, and in her lowest moments, she turned to drugs and alcohol. Addiction is a recurring theme on My 21st Century Blues. 'Escapism' is about getting drunk and high on a night out to avoid feeling heartbroken. ‘Doctor, doctor, have mercy on me,’ she sings, her voice urgent and vulnerable. ‘Take this pain away / You’re asking me my symptoms, doctor / I don’t wanna feel.’ On TikTok, users – mostly young women – set videos of their experiences of self-medicating to the song. ‘I think the reason people relate to the song – especially women – is that we all go through this stuff behind closed doors, but we talk about it like it’s an inside joke. We say, “Oh, I need to get absolutely wasted.” But why? What’s going on to make us feel that way?’

In Raye’s case, there was a lot going on. ‘I just felt awful,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t proud of my art or the way I was living... I wasn’t proud of the woman I was becoming. There was a lot of substance abuse; I was numbing my feelings. I had started avoiding the people who genuinely wanted the best for me because I didn’t want to have to look at my situation. I was spiralling.’

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Dress and gloves, Miscreants; earrings, Ateliersó

By 2021, Raye had landed her highest-charting single as a lead artist. Written with David Guetta and Joel Corry, 'Bed' is stupidly catchy EDM. ‘The song was huge. It was one of my “biggest moments”,’ she says. Fittingly, in the video, she plays a manufactured clone, churned out of a factory conveyor belt. ‘I’m playing this, you know, “hot girl”, hair done, smiling... meanwhile, I’m in recovery, I’m straight back to work, so I can’t actually process any of the stuff I’d been going through. I fell straight back into the old habits and cycles I was trying to break.’

Luckily, after her tweets went viral, Raye was able to part ways with Polydor without the threat of lawyers. They released her from her contract, ending a drawn-out battle she’d been struggling with since ‘the second [she] put pen to paper’. What followed was a period of slowing down, going sober and reconnecting with the loved ones she’d been avoiding. Somewhere along the way, the music Raye had been putting out had become so far removed from her genuine feelings that when she finally got the opportunity to release work as a solo artist, she first had to rediscover who exactly that artist was. ‘The industry will say whatever it needs to say to get you to do what they want you to do. The manipulation behind closed doors is insane. I knew that was never my identity, but I was left with a lot of figuring out what was. Who am I, what do I wanna do, what do I wanna say?’

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In the end, Raye made a radical return to her earliest approach to songwriting. My 21st Century Blues is the ultimate act of catharsis, full of big emotions expressed with revealing honesty. ‘My biggest thing on this album is candidness,’ she says. To point out that every song on her album is driven by strong feelings might seem like a no-brainer. Singers and songwriters have been sharing their experiences of love, sadness, joy and anger since the beginning of time. But after years of being forced to reduce herself, the album really packs a long-awaited emotional punch.

Take 'Ice Cream Man', a song about sexual assault and its long-lasting effects. It’s devastating and heartbreaking, but there’s also something empowering about Raye’s angry declaration, ‘I’m a woman / A very fucking brave strong woman.’ ‘When I think about the panic attacks, the PTSD... you realise that someone’s actions become your burden to carry, and there is nowhere you can put it other than a therapy session. That’s so isolating. It’s not the kind of thing you can bring to the surface easily. You can’t hang out with a bunch of friends and be like, “So guys, do you want to talk about rape today? That’s been on my mind a lot!” That song is me bringing it to the surface.’

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She says misogyny and sexual assault are rampant in the music business. ‘Every girl I know in this industry has some sort of story to tell me. The studio is such a vulnerable space. And if you say something, you create an enemy who will spread rumours or blacklist you – and you need those connections to open doors for yourself. Even though the people decide very much what’s consumed on the outside, inside, the music industry is still very much a gatekept society.’ When I ask her what advice she’d give to young women artists, the speed at which she reels off a list of precautions is telling. ‘Trust your gut. Never go to the studio alone; always bring a friend or a chaperone. If you’re going to drink, don’t have more than two. Always tell someone where you’re going to be. Don’t sign anything before a lawyer has read it. If something feels wrong... leave.’

Shaping the future

Raye’s exploitation has many faces, but her focus is on moving forwards. ‘I have to find peace. I have to see the glass as half-full. Music is my way of being loud and owning the narrative,’ she says. ‘I’ve taken control on a very personal level to reach out to a lot of the people who have hurt me or crossed a line – I’ve confronted it head on.’ She also found solace in reconnecting with her faith, which in part came from watching Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect, starring Jennifer Hudson. ‘I cried and cried watching it. You see her losing herself and then coming back to God. I don’t know if I would be here today without my faith,’ she admits.

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Top image: corset and leggings, Marine Serre; earrings, By Alona Bottom image: hat, Emma Brewin; earrings, By Alona

Her struggles provided a crash course in self-care. Nowadays, when she’s not working, she spends a lot more time alone, walking her dog, Yoshi, or playing Nintendo Switch. Raye lives with her two sisters in south London. ‘We’re always holding each other up,’ she says. Having confronted her own experiences of addiction and exploitation head on, she’s becoming a passionate advocate for other women in similar situations. After tweeting about her ordeal, her inbox was flooded with messages from other artists. ‘The stories you hear are just mad.’

In 2021, Raye joined fellow Black musicians Alexandra Burke, Nao and Sugababes’ Keisha Buchanan, for Little Mix member Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s BBC documentary, Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop & Power. ‘Having the chance to unite with women who share the same sort of struggle was so powerful,’ she says. In the film, Raye talks candidly about her experience of racism in the music industry, how she felt pressure to ‘suppress’ her Blackness in order to be more marketable, as well discussing colourism (her mother is Ghanaian-Swiss and her father is English). ‘Men will roll their eyes, but it really is so much harder as a woman. Then you bring race into it, and it’s just a completely different game entirely. The darker your skin, the tougher it is. We have miles and miles to go, even in the balance of output – if you look at an average UK Top 40, what’s the ratio of Black women?’

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Coat, top and skirt, ROTATE; earrings, Ateliersó; shoes, By Far

Raye is still passionate about working with other artists, though rather than seeing herself cast as the ‘hot girl vocalist’, it’s noticeable that her independent collaborations tend to skew towards other women (the only features on My 21st Century Blues are with Mahalia and 070 Shake). Recently, she’s been in the studio with Halle Bailey and 90s R&B juggernaut Brandy. Raye is tight-lipped about these projects. ‘It’s not my place to talk about that private space,’ she explains, though she is vocal about the impact writing for Beyoncé had on her. ‘Beyoncé offered me real self-belief at the time I most needed it. She believed in my talent and in my voice, and I was so, so moved.’ As our time draws to a close, I ask Raye how she plans to celebrate the album release: when the day she’s been waiting for finally comes. For the first time, Raye seems lost for words. ‘I don’t know if I’ll celebrate,’ she says with a grin. ‘I’m really excited,’ she qualifies. ‘But I wanna release albums with an “s”.’ It makes sense. To Raye, My 21st Century Blues doesn’t just mark the end of her fight; it represents the start of something new. She nods. ‘Exactly. This really is just the beginning.’

My 21st Century Blues is out 3 February

preview for Raye gets Up Close with Cosmopolitan UK


Talent: @raye, Photographer: @_emcole_, Hair: @neciashairstyling, Make up: @lanslondon, Digital Design Editor: @jaimesclee, Stylists: @maddyalford @saskiaquirke, Editor-In-Chief: @Claire_hodge, Creative Director: @declanfahy, Art Director @willmatic101, Talent Director: @lottielumsden, Video: @gene.productions @just.archived, Photo Directors: @hearstphotodirector @emilybaho, Entertainment Editor: @dbaxterwright, Interview: @shannonmahanty

On Raye on the cover: Dress, Atsuko Kudo; earrings, vintage Yves Saint Laurent at Omnēque.


Raye in opener: Top, Mugler at Mytheresa; pants, Priscavera; earrings, Ateliersó


Second video, pale pink outfit: Top and skirt, David Koma; earrings, Pond; rings, Ejing Zhang; shoes, Di Minno; pink heels (1st shot), Giuseppe Zanotti


Second video, blue outfit: top, Gestuz; skirt; Ganni; hat, Emma Brewin; earrings, By Alona; turquoise wrapped ring, Ateliersó; resin band, silver ring with blue resin and silver ring with green resin, Ejing Zhang; shoes, Naked Wolfe