Rachel Agatha Keen (professionally known as Raye) was born on 24 October 1997 in Tooting, London, to a Ghanaian-Swiss mother and an English father from Yorkshire. Surrounded by music, Raye first showed interest in becoming a recording artist at the age of eight, and she wrote her first song for a concert in Year 6, performing it at the Southwark Cathedral. At age 14, she was chosen to enter the BRIT School, where she studied for two years before dropping out due to feeling "confined". She spent most of her teenage years learning how to write songs professionally in studio sessions on the weekends. In November 2014, at the age of 17, Raye independently uploaded her debut EP, 'Welcome To The Winter', to SoundCloud, writing, recording, and co-producing the seven tracks. Olly Alexander, the then-lead singer of the UK band Years & Years, discovered her song 'Hotbox' through Hype Machine, and sent it to his record label, resulting in Raye subsequently signing a contract with Polydor Records. In 2015, she released the single 'Alien', featuring Avelino, and covered the Years & Years song 'Shine', later opening for the band's show at Shepherd's Bush Empire. Raye's following EP, 'Second', was released in August 2016 through Polydor, but she struggled to get the label to release an album by her, even though she constantly presented then with completed records throughout the seven years that she was signed to them.
She kept up her profile by performing concerts, and appearing as a guest on other artist's recordings, such as Charli XCX's 'After The Afterparty', and she appeared on the 'VIP' remix to the song with Rita Ora and the rapper Stefflon Don. She also starred in the music video for the Stormzy song 'Big For Your Boots', and featured on the track 'Dreamer' from Charli XCX's collaborative project 'Number 1 Angel' in 2017. She released her own singles 'The Line' and 'Decline' in 2017, and her third EP 'Side Tape', premiered in 2018, following the release of the single 'Cigarette', in collaboration with the singers Mabel and Don. In June 2021 Raye publicly spoke up on X (formerly Twitter) about unfair treatment from her then-label, Polydor Records, revealing that they had been blocking the release of multiple albums made by her over the course of seven years. It got quite messy in the end, and she hit a breaking point, where she was so angry and frustrated that in protest, on 30 June 2021, she went live on Instagram to share some of the songs the label refused to release, which included 'Fantastic' and the demo for 'The Thrill Is Gone'.
One of the last records that she presented to Polydor was to be a dance album, where she needed to hand in songs which were 115 BPM or above, and as far as her constraints allowed, she set out to make an album that was going to be called 'Dark Dance Songs'. The closest thing she had as a guide was the song 'Black Mascara', which later appeared on her official debut album. When she finally extricated herself from her Polydor contract she signed to Human Re Sources Records and finally released her debut full length album 'My 21st Century Blues', which was met with instant acclaim, and was nominated for the 2023 Mercury Prize. As well as releasing some of her songs on Instagram, 200 of her tracks leaked online, allowing us to hear the contents of the many rejected albums that she'd tried to release through Polydor. In the start of what could be a long-running series, here is the unreleased 'Dark Dance Songs' album from 2021, including the demo version of 'The Thrill Has Gone', which includes a Kylie Minogue sample which had to be removed from the official version which later appeared on 'My 21st Century Blues'.
Track listing
01 Uncomfortable (Intro)
02 Walk Away
03 Dark Nights
04 Down
05 The Thrill Has Gone
06 Young & Naive
07 Black Mascara
08 Your Loss (Silly Man)
09 California Dreamin'
10 When You Say It Like That
11 Many A Man
12 No Man
13 Fantastic
