RAYE has never done anything small. Her 2023 debut, My 21st Century Blues, was already a record that announced itself like a weather event, all exposed nerve endings and big-voiced confessional pop. Her second album, This Music May Contain Hope, released March 27, doubles down on the ambition so aggressively it almost collapses under its own weight. Almost.

The record is structured as four seasons, a concept that could feel gimmicky and on this record sometimes does, but mostly lands as something genuinely felt rather than designed. RAYE moves through grief, rage, exhaustion, and eventually something approaching peace, and she does it across 17 tracks and 73 minutes that rarely feel their length.

The collaborations here are audacious. Hans Zimmer shows up on Click Clack Symphony, an orchestral pop centerpiece that works better than it has any right to. Al Green joins for Goodbye Henry, a tribute to vintage Memphis soul that sounds like it came out of 1973 and was somehow improved by the trip. The London Symphony Orchestra threads through multiple tracks. RAYE’s sisters Amma and Absolutely appear throughout, and their presence gives the album an intimacy the grand production choices might otherwise crowd out.

The first half is where the record earns its bolder claims. Where Is My Husband! remains a banger, built for massive rooms and still delivering even when heard at home. Skin and Bones draws on 1970s Aretha Franklin and early 1980s disco in ways that feel fully absorbed rather than borrowed. Nightingale Lane is RAYE at her most quietly devastating, a song that has no interest in announcement and lands harder for it.

The second half loses some momentum. There are interludes, spoken word passages, and a four-minute closing track where RAYE reads the album production notes aloud, a choice that tests patience without quite justifying itself. When the record soars, it genuinely soars. When it indulges, you find yourself wishing someone in the room had said maybe cut two minutes here.

But calling This Music May Contain Hope overlong and occasionally overwrought is not the same as calling it a miss. RAYE is working at a scale that almost nobody in mainstream pop attempts, and most of what she attempts lands. The fact that some of it does not is the price of that kind of reach. The record is genuinely good, intermittently great, and entirely worth your time.