![]() Eazi, 2020’s ‘Secrets’ with Regard and last year’s ‘Bed’ with Joel Corry and David Guetta.īut ‘Hard Out Here’ represents a very deliberate change of lane. It added to her already impressive roll call of club-ready collabs that includes 2016’s ‘You Don’t Know Me’ with Jax Jones, 2017’s ‘Decline’ with Mr. In March, she teamed up with Disclosure for the catchy, UK garage-flavoured ‘Waterfall’. ‘Hard Out Here’ isn’t the first song RAYE has released as an independent artist. “I created this song to remind myself who I am,” RAYE explains, her body language equal parts pride and defiance. She says the song’s “baby I bounce back” line is especially empowering for her. Once I finished writing it, I was running round the garden like a crazy person singing the lyrics.” “I was crying, I was writing, and I was so angry and hurt. “It was an old track that I took the beat from and wrote a completely new song over,” she recalls. It sounds as though the creative process was almost a stream of consciousness. RAYE wrote ‘Hard Out Here’ after she put Polydor on blast, but before she and the label agreed to part ways. At the end of the day, I felt for a long time in my career like I had someone’s hand over my mouth and I wasn’t saying what I really wanted to say.” “If you’re going to listen to that lyric and take offence, then in my opinion, you need to look into yourself,” she says. It’s scathing, bracing, no-holds-barred stuff, and the first single from what will eventually become RAYE’s debut album. “Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth / ‘Fuck you think this is? I told my lawyer: ‘Stand by – there is no wrath like a woman scorned.'” “All the white men CEOs – fuck your privilege!” she sings on her brilliant new single ‘Hard Out Here’, an uncompromising slab of confessional pop. Still, when she said a year ago that she was “done being a polite pop star”, RAYE wasn’t making an idle threat. Having wrestled back control of her career, RAYE isn’t about to let her narrative run away from her. ![]() However, there are points in the interview where it’s clear she’s holding back parts of her story until a future date when it makes sense to share them. She’s also a relaxed host: some musicians would wince at the idea of welcoming a journalist into their house, but RAYE puts NME completely at ease by making coffee and chatting about ABBA’s virtual concert residency. Throughout our hour-long conversation, the artist born Rachel Agatha Keen is as warm and straight-talking as she’s always been. And you know, some of the things I had to put my body through to even be able to that… it’s really quite sad.” But as a woman, it just doesn’t feel like that. “When you sign with a record label, technically they work for you: you’re signing to a company for them to work for your career and take you to that next level. “It’s weird,” she tells NME today as we sit in the kitchen of her south London home, a few miles from Croydon, where she grew up. “Unfortunately we have had different goals artistically and I am very grateful to them for giving me a graceful smooth exit to start my next chapter as an artist.” After eight years on a major, RAYE found herself navigating unchartered and potentially choppy waters as an independent artist. “Polydor are an incredible infrastructure power house team,” she wrote graciously. It’s fair to say the shit hit the fan, and three weeks later, RAYE announced that she had and Polydor had parted ways. ![]() But according to RAYE, this wasn’t enough: her euphoric follow-up single ‘Call On Me’ needed to “do well” for the album to get a green light. How could an artist who’d been signed since 2014 and scored nine UK Top 40 singles be feeling so stifled? The situation became even more baffling when you factored in RAYE’s side hustle as an in-demand songwriter who’s written for Beyoncé (‘Bigger’), Mabel (‘Let Them Know’) and Charli XCX (‘After The Afterparty’).Īt the time, RAYE was riding high in the charts with ‘Bed’, an inescapable dance collaboration with David Guetta and Joel Corry that has now amassed 350 million Spotify streams. RAYE’s public expression of her intense frustration – “I’m sick of being in pain” – sent shockwaves through the music industry. I want to make my album now, please that is all I want.” “Ask anyone in the music game, they know. “I’ve done everything they asked me, I switched genres, I worked 7 days a week,” she wrote on Twitter. A year ago, RAYE called out her record label, Polydor, for delaying her debut album.
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