#96

#96. RAYE & 070 Shake - Escapism. (#67, 2022)

5th of 2022

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The passage of time can do some pretty spectacular things. I have been anticipating this entry for an incredibly long time. I suspect I foreshadowed it with an entry I wrote back in 2023. I was feeling a bit of frustration with the way RAYE was being acted upon by the general public. It felt like the closing chapter of a story where we're all annoyed by the machine that allows certain things to occur, only to end up unwittingly siding with that machine in the long run. As she might say on one of her songs, sit down and let me tell you the story of RAYE.

RAYE's music career starts when she is just a child. She uploaded an EP to SoundCloud in 2014 (all songs that she wrote and co-produced herself) which is discovered by Olly Alexander of Years & Years (who is about to get considerably more famous, himself). This gets RAYE signed to Polydor Records. It gets her in the door and she starts to link up with bigger names. Her big breakthrough comes in late 2016 when she gets featured on Jonas Blue's new single "By Your Side". It's not as big as his hits that came before it, but it's a modest hit. As someone who couldn't possibly be interested in Jonas Blue's music at that point, I took a note of RAYE here as I found her to be distinctive in her role. A bigger break would come just a couple of months later, as she was also a guest vocalist for Jax Jones on "You Don't Know Me". Not only is the song a bigger hit (the 10th biggest hit of 2017 in the UK) and a bigger role for her, she actually appears in the music video for this one.

It's a proper launching pad for RAYE's own music, which starts to trickle out over the years. She has mostly modest success in the UK, her biggest hit as a lead artist being "Decline" with Mr. Eazi, a song that largely interpolates its chorus from Ja Rule's "Always On Time". She releases some EPs along the way, but there's no news of an album, that will be important down the track. Her next big hit comes along in 2020, as a guest vocalist for Regard on his song "Secrets". You start to see the pattern here, as she only seems to make major waves when she's a guest vocalist on dance songs. It was around here when RAYE properly got on my radar as I was drawn in by her songs "Please Don't Touch" and "Natalie Don't". The latter is a little indebted to "I Will Survive" and "Jolene" but does enough to stand on its own. The EP it comes from also contains the song "Love Of Your Life" which I believe is the first RAYE song that was played (sparingly) on triple j. None of these songs make any headway on the charts and before you know it, RAYE is back with another smash hit, this time with Joel Corry AND David Guetta on "Bed". Actually in the UK there's another hit at the same time, "Ferrari Horses" with D-Block Europe, which strangely becomes important later on.

We can only really guess what's going on behind the scenes, but it reaches the tipping point. These songs are still sitting on the charts when RAYE publicly announces that she has parted ways with Polydor. A big part of her grief comes from how she'd been making music for 7 years and was still unable to release an album (according to a tweet from her at the time, she was on a 4 album deal). To her, it's a great deal of shame that makes her feel undermined as a musician and recording artist. Additional comments suggest that she believes she'll only be allowed to make an album if her current single does well, turning the experience of her occupation into 'frantically looking at numbers and stats'. Meanwhile she does everything asked of her by the label, which is probably where all the collaborations come from.

This is one of the most publicised cases of label drama I can recall, where RAYE's very open expression of the situation paints it as a damnation of the very thing that many of us took for granted as a spectator sport. I can remember making fun of artists who wouldn't get albums out because despite being a consistent hitmaker, the label had no trust they could get the same public invested in the long form. Behind many of these cases are talented musicians who don't really get to showcase it because it just isn't the priority in the popular music machine. There are certainly lanes for this, but you have to be pretty fortunate to find yourself in them. Like nowadays you get singers like Skye Newman & Sienna Spiro being derided as carbon copies of singers before them, but they have to fit in that template to get attention in the first place. Joseph Heller could write a book about this.

This story has an exciting climax however, because RAYE started releasing some music independently in 2022 (kind of, she's with Human Re Sources which is under Sony's umbrella, but not as big as Polydor is for Universal). Her first couple of singles didn't really make many waves, but she followed up with a rare modern Double A-Side single, "Escapism." / "The Thrill Is Gone.". I'll bet you know what happened then...very little, actually. I cottoned onto "Escapism." right away as a pretty interesting song, but I remember reading some opinions online that seemed pretty underwhelmed by it, and wanted something more akin to her previous single "Black Mascara.", a bit more straightforward and danceable. For me it felt like some of 070 Shake's weirdness rubbing off on her and I was pretty Rachel Keen for it.

This time I have an even better case than Olivia Rodrigo for being onto the song before it got big because I did actually download it a little while before the song suddenly went viral on TikTok and soared up the charts. From what I can tell, the viral trend uses a sped up version of the song, but I don't think there's anything interesting about the trend itself. It seems like an excuse to get more people to hear this song that sounds a bit different from what's on the radio. I got a little annoyed at the time because now that the song & RAYE were hot property, suddenly all those dismissive voices disappeared and everyone started acting like the song is the greatest thing to exist. If it was just that, I'd probably have been fine with it all.

Instead, what happened is that it ended up being heralded as a major victory against the major labels. Polydor didn't think RAYE was viable as an artist making the music she wanted to wait, except oops, she went to #1 in the UK (and even charted very well in America) doing things on her terms. All of this is great, but I feel like when you're riding on a viral trend, you're just exposing that very same general starvation of everyone else that it causes. You shouldn't need TikTok to make a song sound worse and then suddenly be on board, not only is it not a great look, but it's not a viable one either. It all became even more palpable across 2023 when the whole thing outed itself as the gimmick that it was, and RAYE was struggling again to get a hit when all the bandwagoners jumped off. You're telling everyone you love RAYE and you hate Polydor, but you're unwittingly going straight back to Polydor's offices to give them more money via their artists that continue to play by the rules.

What added to this (and it's probably where my first hypothetical rant came from) is that RAYE did eventually get another hit in 2023, producer cassö saw something in that D-Block Europe collaboration and turned it into the song "Prada", where all three are credited as lead artists. It was some sort of win for RAYE anyway, but it was weird seeing it treated as a defining hit for her when it was arguably more disposable than the music she had to make before (I do actually like it a lot, admittedly). It's like saying you love Tinashe and your favourite song is the Disco Lines version of "No Broke Boys". Paying lip service through the path that's so easy because it's no longer actually going through the forest.

This is all to say, I jumped the gun a bit. Maybe I'm just lucky it's taken so long to actually write about "Escapism." because this is a story that's still developing. If there is any accusation to be made that RAYE's crossover was just a one off gimmick single, then that is clearly no longer the case. RAYE released her second album in 2026 and it was preceded by the lead single "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!". That song went absolutely gangbusters as soon as it was released. While it's certainly a bit more crossover friendly, it's also impossible to deny that RAYE's idiosyncrasies are all over it. It's a song that goes full-on into over-the-top jazz showmanship, with RAYE seemingly pulling off about three roles in one to pull it all together. The numbers are still coming together, but at the end of the day, it might just end up being her biggest hit to date. Despite the album going incredibly heavy on the musical theatre theatricality (I was just listening to it earlier, it's wild), it's managed some genuinely impressive longevity on the charts. I'm writing this two months after it came out and it's still doing better week on week than her previous album's debut. That's taking it beyond lip service and it's proof that people are actually listening to RAYE's music, her quirky vision being very viable. I tend to believe her when she says that she does it for the music and not the success, but sometimes you do need that on your side so you have the financial capacity to do what you want. I would love it if RAYE and her story could further educate everyone on the troubling reality that faces so many musicians around the world.

I don't want to understate just how unusual "Escapism." is as a hit song. From the very start you get an incredibly off kilter synth that doesn't really agree with the drums that compliment it. RAYE switches up her flow multiple times in the lead up and gives the only sense of stability you can get early on, ironically as she's describing a night out that's gone all wrong. If the song ended around the two and a half minute mark, it'd be a little unusual but no more than that. Instead she passes the microphone to 070 Shake who immediately transfers it to her own element. I'd like to talk more about 070 Shake but this entry has gone very long and she'll have a bigger starring moment later on this list (ironically, uncredited). Her verse is brief, but it rubs off on the rest of the song that finds itself in an extended coda that completes the twisted saga.

I should also note that this song landed not particularly high on the list, as a consequence of being a late bloomer (if only there was another month to build the profile, alas). I suspect it would have a very good chance at a top 10 finish if the timing was a little better, but then RAYE's made up for that with two #5 finishes since, once with her own song even!