RAYE’s second album, THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE., came out March 27 and has already become the highest-rated album of 2026 on Metacritic. That’s not a minor claim given the competition. The record is 73 minutes, structured in four conceptual “seasons,” and spans pop, jazz, soul, R&B, big band, and orchestral pop in ways that should feel incoherent and instead feel inevitable.

The collaborators tell you something: Hans Zimmer appears on “Click Clack Symphony,” and Al Green appears on “Goodbye Henry.” These aren’t celebrity cameos; they’re structural choices about what kind of emotional register the album is working in. Big, cinematic, emotionally available, unafraid of grandeur.

The album’s organizing idea, a journey from darkness to light through four seasons, sounds like it could be saccharine. It isn’t. RAYE writes about suffering with the specificity of someone who has experienced it on multiple levels, including the documented experience of being signed to a major label that suppressed her music for years, which she addressed publicly and which led directly to her independent career and to My 21st Century Blues in 2023.

THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is what the sequel to that record should be: the anger processed, the lessons absorbed, the range expanded. “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” is the kind of song title that should be annoying and turns out to be exactly right. “Nightingale Lane” is a ballad that earns every note of its emotional scale.

The 17-track album is out now on Human Re Sources. RAYE is currently on her “This Tour May Contain New Music” run through May.