RAYE’s second album arrives with a title that doubles as a disclaimer. THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is 73 minutes of gorgeous, sprawling, slightly deranged pop maximalism, the kind of record you’d expect from someone who spent years being told what she couldn’t do and is now very much doing all of it at once.

The setup matters. Before her debut “My 21st Century Blues” made her the first woman to win Songwriter of the Year at the BRIT Awards, she was stuck inside a label system that shelved her songs or handed them to other artists. She left Polydor, released independently, and the world finally heard what she’d been sitting on. The follow-up arrives with everything riding on it, and she responds by refusing to make a compact, easily digestible pop record. THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is divided into four season-themed acts, runs 17 tracks, and treats five-minute songs as the baseline rather than the exception. It is an inconvenient record in the best possible sense.

The sonic range is genuinely impressive. “Winter Woman” anchors the album’s emotional core early, RAYE pledging to be “sad and beautiful” in a way that manages to be both theatrical and devastating. Elsewhere she moves through jazz-inflected R&B, orchestral pop that samples both Vivaldi and Aretha Franklin, and a Fred again-style pulse that arrives so unexpectedly it takes a second to recalibrate. Hans Zimmer is on here. Her grandfather is on here. Her sisters appear. It feels like she invited everyone who matters to her into the studio and refused to edit anything out.

The emotional texture is the album’s real achievement. RAYE is not wallowing. She’s doing something more complicated, narrating her own heartbreak with a kind of Bridget Jones self-awareness, seven Negronis deep, knowing she’s romanticizing the wreckage even as she romanticizes it. The London Symphony Orchestra shows up. The thunder arrives on cue. “I’ll be sad and beautiful,” she sings, and the arrangement makes sure you believe her.

The lyrics stay grounded even when the production goes cosmic. WhatsApp calls, Lime bikes, petrol-station cigarettes. She’s writing about a very specific 28-year-old British woman’s experience and trusting that the specificity will translate. It does. There’s a scene-setting skill here that goes beyond generic heartbreak pop. You feel like you know the address of the flat where this album was conceived.

If there’s a criticism worth making, it’s that 73 minutes is a lot to ask of anyone on a first listen. Some of the mid-album tracks take their time arriving at their point, and the season-themed structure occasionally feels like a conceptual frame that doesn’t earn its weight. But the rewards for patience are real. The plot twists that RAYE saves for the ends of her longer songs are the kind that reframe everything that came before. You can’t skip ahead. You’d miss the point entirely.

THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is a grand, overreaching, deeply felt record from someone who spent too long being told to be smaller. She has definitively declined.