Birthdays are like a personal New Year celebration, a chance to start fresh with a clean slate. This took on a more literal meaning for Raye as she brought in her 27th birthday with some bad news: her car was recently stolen, along with the books full of songs she wrote for her second studio album. The car is more easily replaced than her writing, marking an indefinite delay in the arrival of her follow-up to last year’s My 21st Century Blues.
“It’s my birthday and my car got stolen with all my song writing books in the boot so no second album any time soon love you bye,” Raye wrote on Instagram. The singer-songwriter punctuated the post with a cake and red heart emoji.
The carousel of photos she shared features three separate cakes: one that reads “sorry ur car got stolen” in red frosting, another that goes for a simple “Happy Birthday Raye,” and a third lined with music notes with number 27 candles placed next to a Mario Kart cake topper. At least it isn’t all bad.
My 21st Century Blues marked an ambitious debut from Raye who had been waiting for years to be able to release a full body of work. Operating as an independent artist after being freed from a restrictive label contract, she unlocked a new sense of creativity. The album produced the breakout hit “Escapism” featuring 070 Shake and the currently trending record “Oscar Winning Tears.”
Her only proper release since then is the seven-minute opus “Genesis,” which arrived in June. “It kind of hurts a bit to call this piece of music a ‘single’ because it is so much more than just a song to me,” she wrote on Instagram when the record was announced. “This song is a 7 minute labour of love I have been working on since 2022, I have chipped away at, scrutinised, replaced, redone, passionately sculpted this song to become what you will hear in 7 days.”
“I’m sitting in a completely different place now: I don’t have to answer to anyone or meet anyone’s requirements or do any somersaults for anyone anymore. I’m in control of my career and I’m really in the thick of that,” Raye told Rolling Stone last year. “It’s quite liberating. I just feel safe, and I have people who genuinely have my best interest at heart around me, helping me create my visions and contribute to my visions. And it’s just beautiful, honestly. My experience has evolved to be quite different from what it used to be, and I’m really grateful for that.”
The songs from My 21st Century Blues, she explained, spanned years of writing. “The ones that stood the test of time in my head and my heart, and also songs that fit the theme of this album the most intentionally,” she said of deciding which ones to include. “I think the beautiful thing is when you can still love a song after having it for so long.”
