WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARS, THIS IS WHAT'S LEFT: THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. (SLIGHT RETURN)

 

 

I wrote a review of this album at the time of its release, based on a few initial listens and gut instinct. Since then I’ve had time to “break in” the album, much in the manner of a new pair of shoes, and lived with it for a while.

 

I remain convinced, however, that THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is one of the most remarkable and moving albums I’ve ever heard. I have no time for professional contrarians who scoff at its alleged indulgences and pretensions, as if those two things weren’t what art was all about – for this is art, and given the nod to Allen Jones in the “Click Clack Symphony.” video there is a strong element of performance (if not performative) art at work – and therefore condescendingly patting RAYE on the head before commanding her to bend it and know her place. We know this because she attacks precisely these people in “I Will Overcome.,” the same people who undervalued or, more historically accurately, ignored Amy Whitehouse because they didn’t consider her as cool as Joss Stone. I will leave Rosalia and Lily Allen comparisons to others but overall pop music and its critics maintain the same analogous relationship as the dog and cat in this picture:

 

 

 

TMMCH. is a record of unanswerable brilliance that searches for answers before subtly revealing them. It proceeds as most albums worthy of that name ought; as a story, with songs as punctuation. Escalator Over The Hill, The Lexicon Of Love – you may notice a pattern in those records that I cherish above all others.

 

There are orchestras, specifically the London Symphony Orchestra – you cannot believe how immense and shattering their gradual presence on “I Will Overcome.” becomes, and how the song’s narrator suddenly shatters the glass pane of studied mourning to find she is standing atop a mountain that her body ached to climb. “This is a song to remind me, since I needed one” goes the bookmark of a refrain; at this early stage she is in no frame of mind to overcome the next set of cobblestones, never mind her pain – but this magnitude reminds her very forcefully that, at some stage in her life, she will have to do it.

 

Throughout the album’s seventy-three or so minutes, RAYE never quite manages to overcome the absolute shit that was dealt out to her in her earlier life, but she is aware (as the late Mark Fisher remarked) that digging a tunnel out of her hell has to start from where she is, and coming to terms with the hideous men who have done the shitting on her – it is suitably disorientating that the record’s two most horrible lyrical scenarios come in the guises of upbeat numbers (“Beware..The South London Lover Boy.” and “The WhatsApp Shakespeare.”), the latter of which gleefully mutates into a series of John Zorn/Mike Westbrook/Carla Bley-style rapid-fire genre pastiches, and that the musical theme of “Beware” is a mirror image of the one in “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”

 

The men who betray RAYE, in various shades of intensity from calling off a long-term relationship to almost killing her, are not, I think, different versions of the same man – the “Henry” of “Goodbye Henry.” who ends the affair in Tulse Hill’s Railway Tavern is not the same one who breaks up with her in “Nightingale Lane.” (which is in the G1 netherworld of Balham/Furzedown/Tooting), although the singer subtly refers to problems with drinking in both. But time and time again she ends up being rejected, in one form or another – which is why “The Winter Woman.” is so striking, more so perhaps than the forthright reportage of Rhoda Dakar and the Special A.K.A.’s “The Boiler,” because here we just feel the singer’s absolutist numbness, the hospital nightmare scenarios of getting off with Alice at the bar, petrol stations (possibly even the one next to where I once lived on Leigham Court Road), Ubers, speeded-up-in-her-head voices (which made me unavoidably thing of Charli xcx’s “Shake It”) fluttering moths of Vivaldi samples – a deliberately untouchable coldness; the Pet Shop Boys would have been proud to have helped write (that lovely ache of a progression from the chorus to “Life goes on…”) this song, but only RAYE could have sung it (“her castle on the hill where no one come or no one goes"; cf. Paul Simon's "I touch no one and no one touches me"). It is by far the record’s saddest moment, and her bird (nightingale?)-like tones in places put her surprisingly close to Elizabeth Frazer.

 

Yet it isn’t just about RAYE herself, this record. “Click Clack Symphony.,” as has already been observed by Rob Chapman and others, ranks alongside the great masterpieces of 1968 orchestral maximalist pop – “Eloise,” “MacArthur Park,” “Yesterday Has Gone” – and ascends to transcendental art in a way very few pop records manage (and SO many lazy kneejerk observers were caught napping by it). I first became aware of Hans Zimmer through his work on the soundtrack to the 1985 film Insignificance. That soundtrack was released on ZTT Records, and I am certain that Horn, Morley, Fry and co. have been outstandingly touched by where it has led; Zimmer embraces RAYE’s saved soul at the song’s climax as fully as Anne Dudley’s strings gave the Martin Fry of “All Of My Heart” an encyclopaedically enveloping hug. The singer has just about enough life left in her to summon her friends to run come save her, but in the end realises that she’s going to have to save herself, and not simply wait for the mythical shining knight to trot up and sweep her away (that too is the central message of “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” – namely, that it would be VERY nice to find the right man, but it’s not ESSENTIAL…). Yet Zimmer’s score manages to do that for her, taking her thousands of miles away from the song’s initial “medieval estampie as orchestrated by Michael Nyman” approach.

 

(Two further notes: the general critical reluctance exhibited thus far towards TMMCH. reflects music critics' general and ongoing - and possibly hardwired - incomprehension of music made by and primarily for women. You don't get the importance of "Click Clack," men? Here's the thing - you're not supposed to; it's not meant for you.

 

Secondly - and I admit that this is almost certainly my twisted view alone - there is another signifier of peak ZTT as "Click Clack" moves patiently towards its cathartic [self]-release;; the siren you hear at the beginning of the Annihilation Mix of Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Two Tribes" reappears, and given the almost empty suburban greyness that represents this moment in the song's video, I did wonder whether this was the last chance to dance before...the bomb dropped? Yes, I clearly need to get out the house more...)

 

“Click Clack” marks the point in the record where the idea of the sun breaking out from behind the metaphorical grey cloud first becomes apparent – and it is at precisely this point that the record begins to break away from pure self-examination. One of the many reasons why “I Know You’re Hurting.” is so great a song and record is that RAYE turns away from herself to face and address us, her listeners. In the song’s video, filmed at Abbey Road Studios, she performs entirely while sitting on the floor (and occasionally adjusting her headphone input). Any professional singer who knows about the importance of singing from the diaphragm rather than the larynx alone will immediately recognise just how difficult it is to do that, not to mention some exemplary dramatic work with her hands and upper body – although a conductor is present (albeit with his back to her), she seems to be directing the entire proceedings as she sings.

 

But what a song. Never mind “Everybody Hurts” (as great as it is) – “I Know You’re Hurting.” reaches through the fourth wall like no other pop song has really ever managed (Kevin Rowland, to whose My Beauty TMMCH. owes, I think, a great emotional and structural deal) – and it is wholly based on one simple three-chord vamp. Sometimes contemplative, more often sorrowful – there’s a remarkable, almost tearful quiver in RAYE’s voice when it becomes especially emotional – and climactically forceful when needed, her vocal performance here is exemplary, down or up to the wearied ski slopes of “Oh-oooh-woah-wooah” and the candid reserve which immediately prefaces any emotional catharsis. It feels as though the tortured epic landscape which arranger John Cameron variously painted in Kathe Green’s “Run The Length Of Your Wildness” and Suzi Quatro’s “Angel Flight” – the latter, like TMMCH., is structured around the four seasons and concludes with the same wind that ends “Click Clack.” – has been redefined. And unlike any of its epic predecessors, RAYE crouches down (which is why she’s sitting down in the video) at the end and implores her listeners – that is, US – not to kill ourselves. Does art have any higher purpose than to heal?

 

Following “Hurting” with “Life Boat.” is emotionally difficult to endure. The latter is ostensibly an EDM “banger” with as many build-ups and climaxes as Daft Punk’s “One More Time” had demonstrated a quarter of a century earlier. But it is also a mantra, repeating its essential plea of “I’m not giving up yet” in as many voices and settings as are manageable, as well as incorporating a long monologue from a beaten-down old man which you would not encounter in any bland wellness workout playlists. Even RAYE herself isn’t out of the sinking yet – she’s cried an ocean and tried not to drown in it, after all – but the point here, as already intimated by the “you don’t have to do this all alone” of “Hurting,” is that everyone is in the same sinking boat, and we all have to work together in order to ensure that we don’t give up (on life – RAYE’s cry of “SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!” might be the record’s single most cathartic moment*).

 

(*unless you count the track's unspoken catharsis, namely that "Life Boat." also serves as the answer to and ultimate rebuttal of RAYE's early major label days as dance featurette and songwriter-to-rote; those Jax Jones and David Guetta tracks turned out to have their uses...) 

 

After the autumn and winter must therefore come spring, and RAYE is faced with the same problems but has now found different means to deal with them. “I Hate The Way I Look Today” is a jolly Rose Murphy/Blossom Dearie-style jazz fingersnapper, complete with “Your Father’s Moustache” big band unison vocals, a cracking tenor solo by Graeme Blevins and cheerful studio chat at its end (Buddy Rich on the tour bus this is not) - about body dysmorphia. But RAYE, as depressed as she might initially be to stare in her mirror, is now more resolved to be IMPRESSED by what she sees; in other words…she is OVERCOMING herself.

 

There follow two further songs about break-ups, but neither is especially wintry. “Goodbye Henry.” plays with very Kevin Rowland-esque narrative devices, repeatedly issuing sung disclaimers about, regardless of how happy it might sound, this is an extremely SAD song – but to “Henry” she now wishes only her tearful best to him, realising that there was no big reason why they split…just that, sometimes, people grow apart. This is underlined by guest singer The Reverend Al Green – as with Dizzy Gillespie on Stevie Wonder’s “Do I Do,” RAYE is somewhat dazed and can’t believe that the great Al Green himself has agreed to sing on Her Album – who offers words of ancient wisdom and interacts splendidly with RAYE, with the aid of a few nice references to his own back catalogue - as the song continues to modulate to higher and higher keys, like Beyoncé’s “Love On Top” before unexpectedly climaxing with a spoken-word coda that could have come straight from Sarah Cracknell on Saint Etienne’s Tales From Turnpike Lane.

 

“Nightingale Lane,” however. I’ve said before that Aretha or Dusty would have been absolutely honoured to have sung this song, and both should certainly have lived to hear it. There is, on its surface, little to say; the two lovers break up on a nondescript street in the borough of Wandsworth, and every time she drives down that same street, many years later, all that she now sees behind her closed eyes (when she stops at red lights) are ghosts and memories.

 

And yet the emotion that RAYE summons up in this song ranks among the greatest expressions of emotion I’ve ever heard on a pop record. This is of course aided by a wonderful arrangement and orchestration – she has a knack of not quite singing behind the beat but using the structures of song to narrate a story; that is, the emotions come first and the music builds itself around them. Each chorus is rawer and more forceful than the last, and her climactic howl of lament – carefully built up by an ascending series of high-register quivers, like refugees from Victorian parlour ballads - is Lorraine Ellison-level shattering. Has any combination of voice and orchestra ever sounded so sheerly powerful? And just before the FINAL and presumably cataclysmic climax – she backs down, and ends quietly and matter-of-factly in her lower register, over one piano chord. People who tell you that nothing great can ever happen in pop music again are deaf and blind if they can’t recognise greatness in this recording, because – well, why? Because there is now HOPE. She was loved once and is certain she will be loved again. Without that certainly, one gives up on life. “Nightingale Lane” is, finally, in one of the most misapplied of contemporary adjectives, “uplifting,” on the side of carrying on with living.

 

She’s making a steely effort now, but the cards remained stacked against her. “Skin & Bones” is fantastic Renewed Jill Swing, with brilliant vocal octave leaps of punctum, yelling in pity about sad men who just want sex without love (the way RAYE renders three syllables out of the word “nose”!), is worthy, especially in its latter moments with interacting splinters of beats and trumpet obbligato, of prime Michael Jackson (N.B.: this is, musically, a GOOD thing). It is also the other side of the “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!” coin – the same busy lament from two different perspectives and one of the greatest pop songs of this millennium thus far.

 

The call for a “husband,” however metaphorical, introduces the concept of…family. Realising that actually she has never really been alone – her grandmother, after all, appears at the end of the record’s introduction, and again on “HUSBAND” – she turns, firstly, to her grandfather Michael; they alternately sing “Fields.” together and talk to each other, and here we realise that it’s all about continuity, about singing the songs of someone close to us while they’re still here and after they’ve gone, effectively keeping them alive.

 

And when RAYE finally pushes herself out of the slough of despond in “Joy” – a dynamic Housey disco workout with brisk Salsoul strings – she dampens the intensity and gives the song over to her two sisters. What a song, with its references to Psalm 91 – which, you may notice, also gave rise to the title of Sinéad O’Connor’s first album – its declarations of principle (“I AM SOMEBODY!,” “THERE WILL BE JOY!”). If it isn’t going to happen to us, we’ll get up and make it happen. Joy whether anyone else likes it or not! Note also how its central refrain of “I may cry through the night but my joy comes in the morning” refers directly to the theme of RAYE’s 2024 single “Genesis.,” which now sounds like a bridge between her first and second albums – real world sunshine triumphing over internet darkness.

 

Finally, in “Happier Times Ahead.” (which probably sounds more like Amy Winehouse than anything else on this record), RAYE turns her attention back to the world – note that the woman sipping coffee at the front of Caffè Nero on Streatham High Road (just a guess) is the literal mirror image of the “old me” glimpsed in the Chanel boutique window in Paris – and she ends up wishing everybody – us, the world – all the best, finally breaking song to reassure us that the sun was there behind the cloud all the time; we just had to wait for the cloud to move or be moved in order to see it. She hasn’t found her ultimate happiness yet…but, unlike the drunken woman stumbling through early morning Paris at the beginning of this record, she’s trying, she’ll get there – maybe the record’s most frightening yet also most assertive moment comes in the middle of “Winter Woman.” when she vows to “make her name a word you won’t forget.” THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. contains advice on how to do this.

 

It ends, this record, like a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, looking back at the dawning days of the album chart when what people wanted were songs from the show, on sale in the foyer. When albums were albums and told stories. A gleeful, slightly-dazed orchestral waltz in which RAYE thanks us for listening, advises us to listen to it again if we didn’t glimpse any hope in it – with truly great albums, one listen is NEVER enough – before devoting the rest of the album to reading out the credits, in case you wondered why there weren’t any on its sleeve. She takes four-and-a-half minutes to do that on this occasion, as opposed to the thirty or so seconds she devoted to it on My 21^st Century Blues. It’s an enormously generous gesture, emphasising that, although this is certainly her album, it isn’t necessarily about her, that some two hundred people worked to make it come together. It’s also the sort of thing you used to find on children’s records (from “Fields.”; “When did I go from being a kid, my mum tucking me into bed?”). It comforted and reassured you. And if comfort and reassurance aren’t what we always look for in art – although they are certainly the two foremost things for which we look in life – then TMMCH. is a fitting response to its inadvertent BRIT School blood brother, Geordie Greep’s The New Sound; where the latter is a crushing indictment of a man so utterly crushed by life that he can only imagine things happening to him, RAYE tells us how we can get out of that crush and ultimately defeat it. She says she will not begin work on her third album until she has met someone and fallen in love. I have not the slightest doubt that she will make it happen. THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. is one of the greatest albums made by anybody. As a 62-year-old whose body daily aches as a result of climbing my mountains, and whose friends similarly worked to get me out of the house – my castle on the hill (and it was exactly the same Hill) where no one came or no one went (until I learned to invite them) - more than twenty years ago, I ought to know.

RAYE: THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE

(?#1428: 3 April 2026, ? week[s])

Track listing: Intro: Girl Under The Grey Cloud/I Will Overcome/Beware.. The South London Lover Boy/The WhatsApp Shakespeare/Winter Woman/Click Clack Symphony/I Know You're Hurting/Life Boat/I Hate The Way I Look Today/Goodbye Henry/Nightingale Lane/Skin & Bones/Where Is My Husband!/Fields/Joy/Happier Times Ahead/Fin

At the time of writing, this is tipped to become the next number one album. Even on a first listen I realised that the record was, quite apart from everything else that it is, a necessary supplement to Then Play Long...but I still didn't want to write about the 839 unwritten-about number one albums which lie between it and Mezzanine. That tale has been thoroughly told and I possess neither the lifespan nor the patience for sufferance that would be vital to its prolongement.

But I can't not talk about the second RAYE album, which is likely to become the first to reach number one. Her actual first album, the independently-released (because no major label would touch it) My 21st Century Blues, resplendent as its first half was with raw and heartfelt tirades against the music industry, peaked at number two behind Shania Twain's heavily-marketed major label comeback record Queen Of Me just over three years ago.

It is fair to say that HOPE not only takes up from where Blues left off, but expands its elements. Actually it does a hell of a lot more than that. This is a pop record of such genius, vision, ambition and sheerness of entertainment that it shames its contemporaries - and it also reminds us, with gentle forcefulness, of why people put albums at number one in the chart to begin with.

As with Blues, HOPE begins with a spoken monologue - only this time it is set to sumptuous strings rather than the environs of a South London jazz club. When was the last time a number one album commenced with a sumptuous orchestral overture? The speaker is in autumnal Paris - although it could just as well be Rotterdam or Liverpool or Rome; anywhere alone - and it is pissing down with rain at half-past two in the morning - the rain as symbol recurs regularly throughout the record. She is wandering back to her hotel from the bar where she has stood all evening and night, steadily getting more pissed (you see the parallel?) to no response - either nobody approaches her, or they do so the wrong way ("the echo of a belittling assessment").

It is approaching winter. Her grandmother is worried. She cannot go on like this.

The rest of the album tells why she goes on like this, and why she cannot go on like it.

"I Will Overcome." She gets back to the hotel. On her way there she sees a reflection of herself in a shop window and doesn't like it. She acknowledges how people consider her the reincarnation of a Winehouse ghost and how online cynics scoff that she'll never match up - but when Amy was alive, the same people scoffed that she was no Joss Stone. Her red heels click, clicking suggest (even if the music doesn't - at least, not yet) that the Amerie influence outweighs the Beyoncé one, although so far one's impression is that of a halfway house between Lemonade and Kevin Rowland's My Beauty; there's an awful lot of Kevin in RAYE's ongoing asides to her audience, a similar urge to exorcise the horrible thing jammed inside her. Kevin did it by looking at his private history of pop music and fashioning its components to make them work for him and kick his demons out. RAYE does it by continuing to tell her story. She will break through that wall - more like Ultravox's thin wall than Roger Waters' metaphorical one - and if she has to do it with the help of chocolate cake and Edith Piaf songs then who's to tell her that she can't?

With the next two songs she delves back into the root of her pain; the South London wideboys with big mouths "reading poems out the window" (or rapping) with big promises but horrific intentions. Bearing in mind the reference, in a song entitled "Blues," to its subject sitting in the park and working on his sonnets, one realises that the world's most pathetic man whose non-life Mr Greep chronicles throughout The New Sound - who never leaves his crappy bedsit, except in his head - could equally be that noisy bloke in the car or the besuited shithead who approached RAYE in the bar in "Escapism" (what is "Holy Holy" if not "Escapism" rewritten from that shithead's perspective?). In "The WhatsApp Shakespeare" she pseudonymously isolates the specific shithead who fucked her and/or fucked her up, not holding back with her Biblical and Romeo And Juliet references. The six foot two "Romeo Fraud" is this story's major, if not sole, antagonist. RAYE dies, but only inside. She now has to figure out how she can live again.

"Winter Woman" - as per Bomb The Bass, it is literally winter in July - is a searching soliloquy where the abandoned lover vows to remake herself. She has been deliberately marooned in a hellscape of all-night petrol stations, Uber taxis, one-night stands in bars and...the bottle ("Because desperate times become desperate pleasures"). Her mission now is to start digging a tunnel out of hell...beginning from where she is. The song's surface is opulent but its substance is that of the deepest hospital nightmares.

Things begin to change in "Click Clack Symphony," and although Hans Zimmer's florid orchestrations do not particularly suggest the dancefloor, it is nonetheless the propulsion that the singer needs; her friends urge her to come out with them for the evening, knowing that she will need to do this in order to survive. In "Winter Woman" she is left - or has left herself - in "her castle on the Hill (if you live in Streatham, you'll know why I capitalised that) where no one comes or no one goes." But now her friends - because they still exist beyond the thin grey wall of cloud - are intent on excavating her from the castle and reintroducing her to life. It isn't the Next One...but at the moment it's the Next Best Thing. So she agrees to go out and has a very nice evening; she returns home to her headphones and reflects on how "maybe everything was going to be all right...even only for a moment," concluding that, even without the mythical "riding, shining, armoured knight" materialising - she's...going to get through this one.

(Those who can read between my lines and remember how things were will immediately realise how closely this narrative echoes my life in the first half of the first decade of the present century - and in much the same location.)

With "I Know You're Hurting" - such an epic aria - the singer realises that there are other souls in the world requiring comfort and reassurance. She could, of course, be singing this song to herself. But the key cornerstone of RAYE's work is that It's Not Just About Me. Any imagined tendency towards self-pity is effectively negated by the singer's ability to turn out towards the rest of the world, when its chips are down, and reach out towards it. So yes, this song is an "Everybody Hurts" for our time - "Don't you give up on your life" - but it also illustrates RAYE's supreme ability to recognise, acknowledge and touch people who she isn't.

That opening-up continues to unfold in the dance "banger" "Life Boat," done with the help of Fred again.. from Balham - the other side of Nightingale Lane - which movingly hammers home over and over the need to keep going with living; it's rather like a 1992 rave variant on "You'll Never Walk Alone" with hordes of what I presume were sampled people on the street asserting that they're not giving up yet. It also cunningly escalates the record's tempo and sets the stage for brighter things to come.

Setting the stage is an apt term to use here since HOPE has been so palpably prepared as...a musical, and that takes us back to the very beginning of Then Play Long, which as you may recall mostly consisted of records of Hollywood musicals of stage shows, with the occasional actual stage show soundtrack. Big spectacles which told small but universal stories that were magnified to look big, which were intended for all the family - and RAYE has already invoked her family more than once on this record. I suppose the major difference here is that so many of those old musical hits were about stern, grumpy, buttoned-up men who needed a nice, bright young woman to bring them out of themselves - Henry Higgins, the King of Siam, Emile de Becque, Captain Georg von Trapp - whereas RAYE tells this particular story from the woman's perspective. Nevertheless, she was born in 1997...

The emotional and aesthetic bridge between RAYE's two albums was the 2024 standalone single "Genesis." That does not reappear in HOPE, nor does it need to; it represents a state of mind which no longer adequately reflects how the singer feels about things in 2026, and is therefore of its time. Moreover, the song really does need to be experienced in the context of its magnificent video. As great as it is, "Genesis" has to some considerable degree been subsequently superseded by its creator's own progress.

The principal problem that people had with "Genesis" at the time was what they considered its rather clunky switch-up into the final big band jazz sequence. Although this style was certainly not unprecedented in RAYE's work, there is a feeling of trying on a pair of new stylistic shoes and breaking them in, much like New Order's experiments with sequencers and drum machines on "Everything's Gone Green," another majestic exercise in persuading rebirth to emerge from pain.

On "I Hate The Way I Look Today," though, RAYE has very happily settled into her jazz shoes. Musically this is perhaps HOPE's happiest-sounding track, although its lyric is one of the record's sourest. Nevertheless she sounds as though she and her band had an absolute ball recording the song, complete with old-school "Your Father's Moustache" vocal unisons, a namecheck for saxophonist Graeme Blevins and RAYE winding up proceedings by calling for cups of tea all round, a good take (a word here also for big band arranger Tom Richards, whose charts are in places subtly adventurous but overall punchy and direct enough not to drown RAYE's voice out). Lyrically the song inhabits most of "Genesis"' hell, with the singer endlessly measuring herself up against outside expectations as depicted and encouraged in the media. She hasn't quite learned how to love herself yet.

"Goodbye Henry" is possibly the most Kevin Rowland-ish of all HOPE's songs; RAYE spends most of it warning the listener about how sad a song this is, while colloquially reciting the song as if she were chatting with her cousin in Tesco's. The guy's name wasn't even Henry, but their break-up, conducted over gin and tonics at the Railway Tavern (in Tulse Hill!), was clearly painful - he seems to have initiated the break-up for reasons unspecified, although the possibility of another woman is hinted at; more pointedly, RAYE sings, while wishing him all the best, that she hopes that he will "drink a little less."

A specific lyrical reference to love and happiness - later in the song, there is a subtler one to "I'm Still In Love With You" - leads to the guest appearance of the 78-year-old Reverend Al Green, whom RAYE greets in what must be the most enthusiastic welcome to a guest star on record since Stevie Wonder introduced Dizzy Gillespie on "Do I Do." The great man's pipes sound in pretty good order - after all, he very recently recorded a cover of "Everybody Hurts" - and the two voices blend effortlessly (Al is less a ghost for Henry and more like RAYE's long-lost Memphis great-uncle).

Still there is one more emotional exorcism to come - "Nightingale Lane," a place well-known to anyone familiar with the G1 bus route, is RAYE's finest ballad performance here and one of the great pop ballad performances of recent times. Again she is breaking up with someone - and again it is raining - and this gentleman's mouth is, again, "beer-stained." She cannot drive down this street without thinking of ghosts, and probably drives down this street more often than she ought. We begin to perceive the notion that maybe she's the one who's driving everybody away. "I've...I've dabbled in love since maybe every other summer/It never lasts long - they never stick around," she sings, wondering to herself why exactly they don't. This is profound uncertainty - and, as with Martin Fry, one wonders whether one "dumping" or the other has erased something vital in her, such that she has been left to wander through the world searching for an ideal of love that could never hope to become the thing in itself. Or whether it's been her own fault all along.

This is all a very long way away from the entitled capers of Lily Allen complaining about her bastard celebrity husband, or Taylor Swift, allegedly in character (at times a useful get-out clause), swooning over her soon-to-be husband's magic wand in what are almost entirely not "dance bangers." RAYE is trying to figure this all out by herself and is very careful not to blame anybody for being dumped, including the two men she sings of dumping her - blaming only herself. But "Nightingale Lane" is magnificent pop balladry, whichever way you approach it.

On "Skin & Bones" (which RAYE wanted to entitle "Skin & Bones & Lungs & A Heart & Two Eyes & A Liver & A Nose & No Brain") the tempo becomes fast and hectic; she's back at the bar, awaiting a date, ready to impress, but the guy turns out to be yet another jerk (again I just think of Geordie Greep and his not-as-good-as-he'd-like-you-to-think bowling skills) and she is audibly angry; yes I'm in a state but I'm not just going to settle for anybody.

The build-up is sufficiently maintained to segue into "Where Is My Husband!," the record's apex and turning point and as great a pop song as has ever been written by anybody; superbly arranged with breakneck speed (but perfectly-enunciated) lyrics as though Missy Elliott had just replaced Beyoncé in Destiny's Child, along with music that manages to conjure up the mood of everything from "Bang Zoom (Let's Go Go)" to Rob Dougan's "Furious Angels," a lead vocal that manages to sound both plaintive and incensed, sometimes simultaneously, and to cap it all a cameo from RAYE's grandmother, not to mention the best use of the word "diamond" in a pop song since Shirley Bassey. In this song RAYE finally comes face to face with herself, increasingly angry and despairing that this Ideal Man has not yet made himself known to her, but finally realising - as the song's video reinforces - that perhaps she needs to make herself known to him, and furthermore (cue Kevin Rowland again) that learning to love herself is the greatest love of all. Loosen up and just be yourself - then he will appear, and it will be as natural as sunshine on the first Wednesday morning in May.

It now only remains for RAYE - since it is now "summer" - to turn towards the world and let others in, and indeed she gives the rest of the record over to other people. "Fields" is performed as a sort-of duet, in tandem with the spoken voice of her grandfather Michael, and is a terribly moving piece of work in which she opens up about her chronic self-doubt and possibly self-hatred, wondering what happened to the happy child she once was and whether growing up was all it was cut out to be. Michael then addresses her with kindness and patience, pointing out that he himself has been a songwriter and confessing his worries about who might sing his songs when he dies. Tearfully RAYE promises that she will do her best to ensure that his songs continue to get heard and played, and he in turn encourages her to continue with her life as this how she will attain the freedom which she craves so sorely. His voice will live on through her art. There may be no higher ambition. Do you remember what I said when I started The Church Of Me? Maybe you don't because it's coming on for quarter of a century ago now, but I said that my primary ambition was to maintain and conserve the memory of someone who was no longer there to read my writing.

Well, all of the writing that I've done since then has become a resource, an archive in itself, for others to read and perhaps carry on after I have gone - and, at my time of life, I now have to think about things like that. And so it is with HOPE; this is a memorial to pain but not a consecration of it and it has no defined end other than the one life imposes on us, which RAYE acknowledges in both the record's first and sixteenth songs.

"Joy" features RAYE's two sisters, Amma and Absolutely (yes!) in a celebratory upbeat ode to exorcising pain and sorrow and, contradictory to what Roger Whittaker might have thought, saying that there WILL be a new world in the morning - although Mr Whittaker's belief was that, if you wanted a new world in the morning, you had to get out there and make it yourself.

The coda, "Happier Times Ahead," quite distinct from being an apocalyptic epic closer - this is not "The Magician," and RAYE's underlying message appears to be, when the smoke clears, HOPE is what's left - is worthy of Saint Etienne at their finest, a buoyant, easygoing sixties midtempo song in which - again like the Saint Etienne of "Teenage Wasteland," only far more optimistic - the singer casts a bird's eye on different people in different parts of Britain; the girl now looking through the other side of the mirror, but sipping coffee on a Saturday morning, perhaps on Streatham High Road, instead of downing Negronis - RAYE could obviously be singing about herself - the removal man at Bond Street who keeps it all in because that's what men are "supposed" to do, the bereaved Midlands widow who can't understand why after sixty years (see also "Alone Again [Naturally]") - all of these people, hell, all of US, are in pain, and I'm in pain most of the time because of my health, and I'm living in a rotting society with a more than zero chance of dying horribly in a concentration camp at some point after 2029, but you know, we can't live our lives as though everything's about to end suddenly; no human being is designed to do that, and we want to live and not merely exist - but we patently cannot depend upon the systems and reassurances that we were brought up to believe would always be there for us; we have to build new ways of communicating and working with each other in order to build a new and better society.

That's what RAYE's saying - we're all in it, up to our necks in it in fact, and we just have to keep on being in it. No "positive steps" or "little things" that some quack pop-psychologist tries to peddle to us as if we were all sodding infants. It has to come from us, and from ourselves. Keep going. That cloud will disappear, and what's that bright thing behind it; mmm mmm mmm, it feels so good! Her search for a true lover continues; the story does not resolve neatly. RAYE herself has said that she's a bit old-fashioned and would like someone just to come up to her in the bar, chat knowingly about jazz - as opposed to showboating mansplaining - and show he's got a degree of intelligence and is different from all the others. She's trying to turn herself back into the real RAYE, someone who would attract that kind of person. How will it all resolve? Wait until her next album to find out.

What RAYE does in the final five or so minutes of HOPE is not without precedent - she did the same thing at the end of Blues, on a track also entitled "Fin" - but this is a Technicolor and, dare I say it, a New Pop variant. She thanks us all for listening, escorts us back into the cinema foyer with words of encouragement which echo and negate the despair of the album's beginning, bids us farewell...

...and with a SWOOP of orchestral colour as though the overture to The Sound Of Music had just started, RAYE reads out the album credits, in full (which is why they are not to be found anywhere on the CD package nor on her website). Of course it is an indulgence - what art isn't? Oh, naughty over-ambitious double album, but I remember the snottily bad notices that Exile On Main Street, Songs In The Key Of Life and Tusk received when they first appeared (as opposed to, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans and Physical Graffiti). Anyway, reading out the credits is fun! It's the equivalent of announcing that albums of the songs you just heard are available to buy downstairs. It also acknowledges that the very first number one album "spun to a close" with a reference to its status as an album, not to mention that other album where the band welcomes us, says goodbye then gives us a bird's eye view of a song describing what's happening in different parts of the country, or even that universally-damned album which was released just over two months before RAYE was born, and which concludes with a singalong reprise, as though saying, oi oi, that's your lot. Or, for that matter, yet another album which bears a narrator telling a story and a singalong we're-all-in-this-together ending. Furthermore, she reminds us very politely, but with soft passion, that this record has been released independently, on the Human Re Sources label. Screw the major companies, who only ever wanted to screw her when they felt their time was right.

I can now definitively say that, oi oi, as far as Then Play Long is concerned this is your lot. I never did get to write about To Pimp A Butterfly or Blonde or Lemonade and am happy to defer that task to others more qualified. However, I would be failing in my duties as a music writer if I did not say that, not only is THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE a towering artistic achievement of its age - and certainly one of its age's most sheerly generous achievements - but also that it appeared in a startling week which also saw the release of revolutionary albums by Fcukers and Irreversible Entanglements (Ö is the sound of Mamdani's New York talking back, and "if you wanna party, come over to my house" is one of 2026's greatest songs so far, an actual anthem of resistance ["THEY don't wanna party!," and we all know who "THEY" are], while Future Present Past is as eloquent and incendiary a jazz record to appear on Impulse! as Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra), and a fortnight after Mutiny After Midnight by Sturgill Simpson (as "Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds," one of the great American revolutionary records, counterparted this week by its coruscatingly corrosive female equivalent, Melanie Martinez' Hades. And the list does not stop there.

Nevertheless, THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE, even at this early stage, seems to me a clear masterpiece in the same way that The Lexicon Of Love was when I'd only heard it three times. It is at that level. This is what is happening now. Celebrate it now. Then play long.

THE WRONG PEOPLE SAY IT OUT LOUD, BUT IT CAN BE BETTER IF WE SAY IT: 2025 IN REVIEW

 

Thurston Moore appears to have been the straw that's broken this particular camel's back. Three days ago he posted a list of the "350 Best Records of 2025" on Substack - note, records, not albums. I had to go down to number eleven to find a choice that I agreed with but that's neither here nor there (his top record was the E.P. Fundus by the Antwerp-based harpist and composer Laura de Jongh, very much a recital that summons a respectful nod rather than a passionate embrace).

This exercise has provoked a fairly virulent response, best summed up by one Bluesky poster in the words: "shut the fuck up old man nobody cares anymore." All of a sudden, as 2025 hiccups to an unseemly close, nobody indeed does. I don't claim that Mr Moore was inspired by my list of the 550 (or so) best albums of 2024 from twelve months ago, but last year mattered musically in a way that this year has not.

Speed-checking my own records, I find at a charitable best about 250 albums from this year, all of which I have listened to thoroughly, that I once might have wanted to convert into some sort of order - and I probably only liked about a third of those enough to want to get them physically. To that I could add about fifty more that are either really not very good or plainly unremarkable - and most of the latter are the ones which appear to have cropped up in so many end-of-year lists, lauded and applauded. We have to ask ourselves why this has happened.

I think the root lies in the likelihood that music criticism is fundamentally run on a very wrongheaded basis. In the early days of music magazines, which until the mid-1960s, and in many cases well into the 1970s, were essentially trade papers servicing the industry, reviews of records were utilitarian and to the point. The new Beatles or Rolling Stones discs were generally summed up as "another solid effort from the boys" and their reviews told you exactly what the records sounded like and what you might reasonably expect from them.

Whereas I can search through reams of reviews of, for example, Lily Allen's West End Girl, and find acres of lyrical analysis but practically nothing that tells me what the record actually sounds like. This is in huge part to do with the fact, as Charles Shaar Murray pointed out half a lifetime ago, that most music critics are disillusioned English Literature graduates who view the text as paramount and know little, if anything, about musical theory. Added to that is the knowledge that readers are dissuaded by musical analysis, which is usually too technical for them to understand, unlike the Good Story promised by the lyrics.

Pretty much all of this type of thinking is undermined by the fact that, as I have lately been reminding myself, the late James Hamilton ran reviews in each week's Record Mirror packed with simple information about what records sounded like, down to beats per minute. It is true that his were specialist pages tailored specifically for professional disc jockeys. Yet he was easily able to communicate his deep love of music in clear and simple terms which hit with laymen such as myself. As with anyone, he had his likes and dislikes, but always kept an open mind and happily welcomed new developments in music; Arthur Russell was on an equal footing with Five Star (although Mr Hamilton rightly thought the former much better than the latter!).

And there was never a trace of sentimentality in Hamilton's writing. Unlike James Murphy, he was there, in the late fifties when discotheques had become the new fashion in Paris, in the early sixties when the Beatles and Motown were emerging; he spent most of my birth year, 1964, visting the Harlem Apollo on a weekly basis. Yet he understood, as so few writers do, that living in the past was really camouflaged dying. In his words, he'd much rather hear next month's hit than another dredged-up oldie, and I am in complete concordance with that philosophy. He was banging the drum for what would become House music in 1984, had little time for Rare Groove which he rightly viewed as the province of superior-feeling spivs.

All I see now in music writing - and to a huge degree also in broadcasting, but that's another story to which I'll come shortly - is what the aforementioned James Murphy might have described as borrowed nostalgia for two or three unremembered decades ago (as far as "Losing My Edge" is concerned, I myself would call it "the misremembered eighties" but more about that anon). Bands and artists whose records the critics bought when they were at university and to which they remain sentimentally attached; how else to explain the unmerited approval of Pulp's almost wholly unremarkable More, as opposed to relatively-unheralded but excellent albums by Suede, Stereolab and Ash which quite clearly are not content to dwell in the past?

Or the fortysomething columnists who sang along to Alright Still a generation ago and are happy to cheer on good old Lily fighting the good fight against her celebrity actor bastard husband because sisters are doing it for themselves (if not necessarily for anyone else). West End Girl stands as one symbol of this misapplied thinking; ravenously hyped up - and therefore streamed out of curiosity - by these same columnists (and no one else) at the time of its release, it spent four weeks in the album top ten (peaking at a reluctant number two) before going into commercial freefall. On actual sales it peaked at number eighteen and was gone after a fortnight. In Ireland it charted for just over a month, while in Scotland it didn't chart at all. A forthcoming physical release might revive the record, but fundamentally it is commercially dead. The fish didn't bite at the bait. I listened to it in full twice and couldn't remember how any of its songs went, even while I was listening to them, only knowing that I wasn't really bothered who "Madeline" was. In the meantime, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Ms Kitchen Disco herself and just over six years Allen's senior, returned virtually unnoticed with Perimenopop, a genuinely brilliant and eminently danceable examination of what it feels like to be a woman in your mid-forties who is treated by society with patronising contempt.

There is also the residual and seemingly unshakable nostalgia for polite mid-late nineties guitar-based indie music. Listening to the new and umpteenth releases by Big Thief and Wednesday, it is hard to shake the feeling that the sand is well and truly running out in that hourglass and that this type of music has about as much to say to people in 2025 as. well, the music of Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen would have had to say to Prodigy fans (notwithstanding the actually rather tangible thread of Essex-based all-night raves that connects the two). It's a bit like Jazz Journal voting for a Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven box set as album of the year in 1980 (which they did). The world today is a miserable and hellish place and sitting about pondering and wallowing in that misery isn't going to improve it. This music is the equivalent of New Yorker fiction, tales for melancholy centrists about ageing philosophy lecturers nearing the end but still having affairs with students young enough to be their grandchildren (see also the normally excellent Divine Comedy's really dreary new album with its soporific reflections on ageing, bereavement and other things I already know about; cheer me up, Neil, and stick to the comedy character studies at which you're so good).

Or the urge for something, anything, to fill that gap in the ageing music writer's mind. You know that feeling, or at least Hornby summed it up in High Fidelity, about the Saturday lunchtime record shopper who mooches gloomily around the shop for half an hour only to come back to that blues compilation he saw when he came in, which probably isn't that great but at least it's something? That's much the case with Geese (the band, not the waterfowls). I liked Cameron Winter, alone with his piano, on Later With Jools Holland, then found his Heavy Metal album samey, overproduced and irritating. Writer Phil Freeman best described Geese as "Timothée Chalamet in The Thom Yorke Story." I've listened to Getting Killed on three separate occasions and can find nothing in it save utterly generic "alternative" rock music sung by Rufus Wainwright with a bad cold and questionable politics (I refer you specifically to the song "Taxes"). But there's no real U2, Radiohead or Strokes any more, and obviously no more Smiths or Stone Roses (you can't resurrect the bass player), so...they will do.

I'm aware that by saying this I'm potentially placing myself in the same camp as boring old sixties heads who looked at the Pistols in 1976 and sighed, "I've seen this all before with The Who." But what the Pistols were doing, and more importantly how they were doing it, was entirely new and different. They tore a new gap in the market, whereas Geese should more properly be called Polyfilla.

Or the desperation to find what critics can comfortably perceive as newness. I've already gone on about Rosalia's Sarah Brightman/Vivaldi tribute album/fashion show soundtrack Lux here and will only add here that in ten years from now, people will look back in wonderment at how we were so taken in by its arrogance, pomp and pretentiousness, and understand why the next punk explosion - whatever that turns out to be - needed to happen (it's apparently all really about Bad Bunny, except that Bad Bunny made much the better record this year).

And of course there is the disaster that is The Life Of A Showgirl. I said things about TS being the most important star pop has ever known in my 2024 summary, and it turns out that I was right, but in all the wrong ways. One awaits the radio commercial: "were you mis-sold a T*yl*r Sw*ft album that was marketed as wall-to-wall dance bangers but turned out to be the same old miserable acoustic shit as before? Call this number..." Or: were you mis-sold a Labour government at the last election?

Same old miserable acoustic shit. In 2025 I've listened to Tortured Poets zero times, but can't stop playing brat. Charli xcx responded to TS' platitudinous misreading of her song in the best way, i.e. by not acknowledging it at all and going off to work on a film soundtrack with John Cale. But even the reasonable TS stuff gets tainted by the smugness of Showgirl, a record whose sole aim is to game the charts, or whatever constitutes the charts these days - as with the profoundly ordinary "Ordinary," one cannot imagine people streaming "Ophelia" for more than a few seconds, as opposed to the kids at the back of the bus or the ladies in the office who sing along to "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" and "Golden," or anybody in Ireland, where "EURO-COUNTRY" has become a new folk song for the ages - a record which appears to exist for no other reason than to allow TS to continue being TS for another six months or so.

I can't remember any of the songs on Showgirl without prompting, and horrible songs they mostly are too, apart from the last one which is markedly saved by the intervention of Sabrina Carpenter (whose Man's Best Friend bears all the wit and inventiveness - and, if you listen carefully, also the spite - that Sw*ft once naturally possessed). The get-out clause that this is yet another persona, an imagining of the horrible character TS might turn into, doesn't work because T*yl*r isn't Bowie. Songs worshipping your fiancée's, um, attributes, laments for those who have been "cancelled," the singer's significant refusal to condemn what Harry Shearer calls the Felon-in-Chief's use of her music in his campaigns - this all points to an imminent Republican trad wife and the eventual horror that really this was what she, and therefore by extension all pop music, was about; just the urge to make money, devoid of all other considerations.

Oh, squeal certain critics, how dare you criticise a Pop Superstar for making a fun album about decadence - well, it has to sound decadent in order for that to work. And as far as both Lux and Showgirl are concerned - along with too many other things this year (Wolf Alice's thoroughly unconvincing this-is-what-we-always-wanted-to-do-honest schtick about their retreat into becoming a late eighties Fleetwood Mac tribute band) - they are assumed to be immune to criticism, especially when the person criticising them is a MAN, and you wouldn't be saying this about those records if they were made by MEN?

Which assumption, needless to say (if not to pun), is complete bollocks. If you do not worship Rosalia or T*yl*r you are by definition a misogynist. How does that explain Hayley Williams' astonishing Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, where she rages against not only what's happened to her throughout her life and career, but also at what those running/destroying her own country are doing? Or JADE's funny, furious and inventive THAT'S SHOWBIZ BABY!, the real sequel to Chemistry? Or savagely wonderful albums by, to name but four, Lady Gaga, Self Esteem, Marina, or Lorde? I could go on. Women are in control of pop right now, and that is really as it should be (since in history, from Connie Francis through ABBA to Madonna, they have always been). But we cannot overlook the fact that all of us, now and again and regardless of gender, are also capable of making not very good records.

So what, you ought to ask, was good about 2025's music - and would anyone even notice? I'm not sure anybody cares enough about anything any more to notice, and it certainly isn't helped, either by radio or television, or by social media. There exists this stranglehold of selective nostalgia which is actively suffocating newness. At the beginning of the year I had a little empire of musical blogs which, with two exceptions (this being one, and the other only has another five chapters to go before it finishes), I have allowed to run down. Lena and I agreed to finish Then Play Long the way we did because we felt that its story had been fully told without the need to take another (at the time of writing) 832 (!) albums into account (and in any case it is highly unlikely that I would live long enough to bring that blog up to date; furthermore, I concluded my piece on Mezzanine with a macabre alternate-universe twist so subtle that nobody seems to have got it!).

Uncorrected Bound Proof was an unpublishable spent folly. The Ogun Records blog didn't do anywhere near enough business to convince me that it serviced anything more than an extremely narrow niche interest. This one comes and goes. I'll be taking the Young Punctum blog towards its natural conclusion because if anything that's really blossomed and it's been a pleasure (if also something of a stress, having to do all that retyping) to run it (although nobody who doesn't already know about it or me is reading it or picking up on it).

What all of these blogs, except the one you're reading now, have in common is that they concern themselves with - rest in peace, John Miles - music of the past...and there's far too much of that happening now; too much looking back and missing the art for the trash. If the eighties meant anything to me musically it was in terms of newness and nowness - there was so much new music demanding my urgent attention that I had the neither the time nor inclination to revisit the old stuff. It was exciting and dangerous (but in a good way). Yet if I switch on the radio in Britain now - digital or online - all I hear are the same old bland chestnuts, songs I thought were boring at the time or good songs slaughtered by overexposure, whereas I still want to hear what's happening tomorrow. One would think that starting up an internet radio station would give you free licence to play what you like, except what people seem to like are gnarled oldies too crappy even to pass as camp that you can hear anywhere.

The exception that proves the ironic rule - given its history - is Radio One, which presentation-wise I find unlistenable for more than about five seconds before realising that the station isn't meant for people like me, but for the young, and they seem to operate successfully in a continuous present tense. Whereas 6 Music is a confused beast of a station which plays "new" music that its producers seem to think you ought to like, as opposed to what its listeners might actually want to hear, and cannot readily grasp the simple notion that people tune in to music radio in order to hear music, not guests "dropping in," droning away inarticulately for half an hour and killing any atmosphere, or that a radio station isn't school and that music fans don't tune in to be lectured at, like naughty children at the back of the class, or yelled at as though pop music were a boot camp (balanced out by endless "uplifting" and "calm" bollocks - great art is neither of these things - to appease the possibly imaginary demographic of fortysomething mood mums to which most BBC music radio stations seem to want to attract; sorry, but they long ago ran away to Magic FM and Heart). Radio One gets the idea, though, as to a slightly narrower extent does Capital Radio. Good for both.

Getting back to the Thurston Moore problem, though - I'd just mention in passing that Kim Gordon would never feel the need to compile a list of 350 albums; why should she, she's got a proper life to live? - makes it clear to me that in all ways we need to drag ourselves away from the security blanket of lists and putting everything in order. The gates, thanks to the internet, are all open now; we are our own gatekeepers without the need for intermediaries, can judge music for ourselves and do not feel any need to "rank" its individual components. And we need to come to terms with "the past"; not to deny it, or to airbrush it or cherry-pick from it, but to accept it and use it as a chassis to help drive us through the present. Young Punctum represents me trying to come to terms with my own past because I only have so much time left and need to start putting my affairs in order. But my primary concern, as always, is with now. So should it be for us all.

AFTER ALL THAT, A LIST

But it isn't any old boring list; it's...THE 2025 DJ PUNCTUM AWARDS!!

Album Of The Year: what it should have been last year - The New Sound by Geordie Greep. Having not listened to it nearly enough in 2024, I came back to it last Christmas and have hardly stopped playing it since. It's my new Rock Bottom - that's how deeply I've got into it, and almost singlehandedly it examines in depth what it's like to be a man in the twenty-first century, for better or for, largely, worse. And it boasts more musical invention per pound than practically anything else made this century.

Single Of The Year: "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" by RAYE, who tops this particular list for the second consecutive year, not simply because the song's video was partly filmed literally around the corner from where we live, but because it's a Proper Pop Record with a tune, a hook, lyrics that tell a story in ways pop has not really managed before, imaginative production and arrangement, and hope for both our and the singer's future; she's escaped from the hell documented in "Genesis." and is ecstatically content simply to be herself. Honourable runner-up: "Golden."

Pop, Pop, Pop Music (In A Better World): Greatest Hits by Metronomy and Joy Of Repetition by Hot Chip. If this were 1982 every schoolkid would be singing their songs and you'd have probably seen both bands performing them on Cheggers Plays Pop. As Joe Mount says in his sleevenote, the world of pop has changed in the last twenty years, and it isn't his fault.

You've Heard Them All Before, But Now I've Done Them Better: Tower Block in a Jam Jar by Mozart Estate.

O Canada, Always There When You're Needed: Jane Inc, Debby Friday (probably the year's two best pop albums, in that order), Marie Davidson, Sloan.

Spokeswoman For A Generation: CMAT. 

Rock 'N' Roll Can Never Die: The Ex-Void, Sam Fender, 5 Seconds Of Summer, The Royston Club.

Music Hall's Still Going Too: Baxter Dury, Olly Murs.

I Made The Better Album, Deal With It: Bad Bunny. 

Remember Us? I Bet You Didn't: Ash, Amelia Barratt and Bryan Ferry, Dave, Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai, Songhoy Blues.

Remember Me? I KNOW You F***ing Didn't: Jamie Woon (sleeper of the year and possibly the decade!). 

We're Not Done Yet, Far From It: Stereolab, Suede. 

But You Love Us!: Sparks.

Let's Push Things Forward (Hip Hop Division): Danny Brown, Armand Hammer & the Alchemist, Mourning [A] BLKstar, billy woods.

Let's Push Things Forward (Country Division): Tyler Childers.

D'Angelo Memorial Award For Pushing Things Forward So Let's Celebrate Him While He's Still With Us: Miguel.

Tribute To A King: Cabin In The Sky by De La Soul, the best and most poignant rap album since We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service; "The Silent Life Of A Truth" might be the song of the year. Also, Traces Of You by Ivy.

And finally, but by no means lastly...

WOMEN OWN IT: Black Country New Road, Victoria Canal, Sabrina Carpenter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Ms. Ezra Furman, Alison Goldfrapp, Haim, Mary Halvorson, JADE, keiyaA, Kesha, Lady Gaga, Lambrini Girls, Little Simz, Lorde, Marina, Melody's Echo Chamber, Ela Minus, QUAD90, PinkPantheress, Addison Rae, Renee Rapp, Gwenifer Raymond, Moonchild Sanelly, Say She She, Self Esteem, Sprints, tUnE-yArDs, Wet Leg and Hayley Motherf***ing Williams!