Raye Tour Dates 2026 — Full Schedule, Cities & Venues

Raye Tour Dates — FAQ

About Raye

Rachel Agatha Keen was born October 24, 1997 in Tooting, South London, to an English father and a Ghanaian-Swiss mother, and grew up in a Pentecostal church household where the music education started early — gospel choir, piano, then a place at the BRIT School, the same Croydon institution that produced Adele, Amy Winehouse, and FKA twigs. She left before completing her course to focus on music full-time and signed a four-album deal with Polydor in 2014, aged sixteen, in what looked at the time like a fast-track to a conventional UK pop career.

The trajectory that followed was anything but conventional. Across seven years on the label she scored features and co-writes that placed her on the charts under other people's names (Beauty and the Beast with David Guetta, Decline with Mr Eazi, You Don't Know Me with Jax Jones) and watched her own debut album get repeatedly delayed by the label apparatus around her. In June 2021 she did something almost nobody on a major label deal had done publicly: she went on Twitter and announced she had been signed for seven years and had been told she could not release a solo album, and she asked, in plain language, to be released. The post went viral, the industry response was immediate, and Polydor let her go later that year.

What happened next reframed the conversation. Released independently through her own label Human Re Sources, Escapism (featuring 070 Shake) was released in October 2022, climbed slowly through TikTok and radio, and hit UK number one in January 2023 — her first ever as a lead artist after a decade in the industry. My 21st Century Blues followed in February 2023, a knowingly cinematic album that traced jazz, R&B, classic torch-singer phrasing, and contemporary pop production through a single artist's voice. Black Mascara, Worth It, and Ice Cream Man (her unflinching account of sexual assault) extended the album's reach across 2023.

At the 2024 BRIT Awards she won six — Album of the Year, Artist of the Year, Song of the Year (Escapism), Best New Artist, Best R&B Act, and Songwriter of the Year — breaking the record for most wins in a single ceremony, previously held jointly by Blur and Harry Styles at three. Her solo Royal Albert Hall show, performed with a multi-piece band and full string arrangement, has since been treated as the canonical document of what her live show actually is: a vocalist trained in jazz phrasing reimagining her own contemporary pop catalog inside one of the great rooms in British music. The Mariah Carey reference points are real — the whistle-tone control, the gospel-trained runs — and Raye herself has been open about Mariah as a foundational influence.

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