See RAYE’s Stunning Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

The other day, RAYE was rewatching one of her old interviews. On screen, a much younger version of herself — dyed blonde hair in untamed coils, ambition sparkling in her eyes — spoke about her then-out-of-reach career dreams.

“My voice was a little bit squeakier,” the 28-year-old British pop powerhouse says now on a sunny March afternoon in Los Angeles, laughing fondly at her teenage tenacity. She mimics how she used to sound: “I’m like, ‘I just need a shot,’ ” she recalls. “I was so young and hungry.”

She’d eventually get that shot — but not for many excruciating years, and not in the way she’d once expected. It didn’t come in 2014, when she first signed with Polydor Records and felt, at the time, that she’d made it. Nor did it come in the years she spent under that contract, when other, more powerful people placed her lifelong goal of making an album on the eternal back burner. While her voice gravitated toward soulful pop, her label granted her only a few sparse EDM single releases, some of her own and some as a featured voice on other artists’ tracks — “In the U.K., dance music sold really well,” she explains — but primarily it worked her as a songwriter, her talents benefiting the careers of artists such as Beyoncé, Charli xcx and Ellie Goulding while her own remained in limbo.

By the time she posted an attention-grabbing series of tweets pleading for a change in 2021, she felt completely powerless. “I’m done being a polite pop star,” she wrote at the time. “I want to make my album now, please that is all I want.”

Today, things look a little different. For one, the blonde frizz is gone, in its place a chic brunette bob that — combined with RAYE’s angular face and bright red lips — makes her look a bit like a Jazz Age painting come to life. Anything but squeaky now, her speaking voice is just as divine as her otherworldly vocals, and she has colorful tattoos of the British, Swiss and Ghanaian flags stamped onto her forearm to remind her of her heritage. She’s hoping to get more ink soon, probably of a trumpet, to represent her maximalist, theatrical second album, This Music May Contain Hope , which is already one of the most talked-about pop releases of the year.

Read the full RAYE cover story here .

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/photos/raye-photos-billboard-cover-shoot-1236239843/)._