And God the Jukebox said, “Let there be controversy”…

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Dave Moore: A remarkable song suite — one part Metropolis EP, one part “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and a dash of Idlewild — that’s as good a time capsule of 2024 pop as I can imagine: screen spirals interrupted, bad vibes cleared, devils exorcised, livers detoxified, darkness driven out. It’s more personal, more formally daring, and more just-plain-show-off impressive than any other major pop release I’ve heard in this year of big swings, and more than deserving of a great write-up from Marcello Carlin that is more effusive than I have the energy to be, even though I found myself nodding along. I can only pray that its defiantly celebratory finale translates from the UK (God bless the NHS indeed) to shake some other folks’ collective national bummers, running the gamut from chronic gloom to sickening tragedy. Maybe we’ll see the light eventually.
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Harlan Talib Ockey: It’s very hard to write an “everything sucks” song and pull it off. I’m not really sure this one does. The three distinct sections help separate the thoughts, but you still get lines like “fake democracy, killing overseas” not far from “I edit my pictures to make my waist look slimmer.” Are these related issues? Do they affect RAYE’s narrator in the same way? The second section is the most vivid. “The devil works hard, like my liver” is a fantastically incisive line. The Rihanna-esque backing vocals add an ominous jolt to the song that the other sections shy away from. The other sections are still fairly strong — I really appreciate RAYE’s commitment to being a jazz and blues singer — but her voice is doing almost all the heavy lifting. (Her vocal control at the end of the first section is showstopping.) I’m not eager to say “Genesis” should have been broken into three songs; for one thing, it already is on its digital release. There is a narrative through-line here. But it’s that through-line that makes me think this could have easily been more focused, and more powerful.
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Jonathan Bradley: An extravagant, luxurious suite of pop ideas, and every single one of them terrible, from the portentous spoken word about solipsism and phone addiction to the parade of zippy, overworked scatting that closes out the final few minutes in big-band retro kitsch. Between these two endpoints is a parade of Really Deep Thoughts about democracy and sex and self-esteem (though it makes this Self Esteem sound artful) and religion and pills and mental health and the NHS and government lies and yet more spoken word, with nothing more coherent than a rote boom-bap drum track acting as a thesis statement or organizing principle. It’s not that ambition is awful, but it looks pretty ugly when it’s this half-baked.
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Alfred Soto: The ambition — the effrontery — flattened me for a couple minutes. Writing a song around the tropes of therapyspeak is guaranteed to make me self-defenestrate. RAYE doesn’t pull it off despite the range of her registers and rhythmic ideas: “Genesis” sounds flat despite the determination to avoid flatness even when she gets off decent lines like “anxiety is an index finger pressed against your lips.”
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Katherine St. Asaph: Amy Winehouse doing The Wall is not unappealing; there’s clearly ambition to this, vocally and conceptually. But while I don’t believe that music has to make people comfortable or come from a healthy place, I worry how clear the lines are here between making art about trauma and just reliving that trauma. Also, even if the third act is meant as the cheery facade concealing the second act’s rot, no one is going to interpret it that way; the narrative pull of salvation-via-Real-Music is too strong.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: On her most recent appearance on the NYT Popcast discussing Charli XCX’s brat era, critic Meghan Garvey makes a powerful distinction between pop stars being vulnerable and honest. She argues that in the attention based economy in which pop stars now vie for attention, it’s easy for stars to perform relatability while rarely venturing to share truths that may be ugly or unpalatable. Thus, why Charli is so iconoclast: she never deigns to condescend that we are like her (in fact, she’d argue that she exists on a plane we can barely aspire to), but in the revealing of uncomfortable and taboo subjects like jealousy and fear and anxiety, she becomes more human than those who merely posture at it. RAYE has long existed at the intersection of vulnerable and honest, but she spent the first several years editing herself down to play industry games. “Genesis” is unedited. There’s something spiraling and masochistic about hearing about her ego, her drug addiction, her struggle for life, almost as though if there are some secrets and inner monologues too personal and desperate to be shared. Can honesty be a virtue in of itself when it’s so plain and barren? Giving Rated R Rihanna era vibes, RAYE herself says, “It’s too dark to see.” The last movement, a coda tacked on at the end, hints at something approximating a light at the end of the tunnel, something not just vulnerable and honest, but also potentially self-transformative. 
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Will Adams: I appreciate the effort RAYE has put into this multi-part self-examination that leaves no wound un-prodded — the second act is my favorite, hitting the same brooding numbness of Rated R — but there’s a point at which it becomes Too Much. “Genesis” is almost twice the length of “Escapism” but delivers half the impact.
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Brad Shoup: The Project Pat flow is where I bailed, but if I’d just hung on a couple more hours I’d have gotten to the Nawlins-baked jump blues. (I can easily picture the Genius annotator mashing out “Genesis” begins with an adage about being in one’s twenties, and the song literally ends with music from the Twenties.)  It’s a misery porn speedrun that shamelessly lifts from 2010 Kanye to create import; any interesting art-pop poses end in bad jokes or non sequiturs. It’s so fake deep Wile E. Coyote tried to run through it.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: “Phones Bad” is perhaps the defining cultural critique of our time, yet few have ever expressed it in such gory detail. This is “Phones Bad” The Musical, a rock operatic sweeping history of pop that, even as it moves from style to style, remains hyper-focused on circling the online drain — if it weren’t such a British song I’d expect her to work “doomscrolling,” but “let me in your algorithm” will have to do. “Genesis” succeeds on the strength of what should be its most obvious, clichéd moments, fully committing to its bit and never wavering.
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Oliver Maier: The best section of “Genesis” is the first one, where RAYE’s voice slides deftly between half-rapping and theatrical Fiona Apple vibratos. Section ii is in the vein of expensive-sounding, post-MBDTF orchestral boom-bap that doesn’t work for me at all, and section iii is endearing in concept but not a great listen. I get the sense from RAYE’s lyrics that she has trouble jettisoning a line or idea once she’s attached to it, but you have to hold your own pen to a higher standard to nail a seven-minute odyssey on the entirety of society’s ills; the trite metaphors don’t pass muster.
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Scott Mildenhall: Ambitions realised with barely a beat overstretched, RAYE reassures that her victories remain pyrrhic. From sprawling monologue into incisive emotional précis, she holds the steadiest hand over her own precariety. It’s at times awesome: ornately claustrophobic under diamond-sharpened storm clouds. But then, from nowhere, a parallel universe PPB. The disjunction from part two to part three is such a left turn as to be bathetic. Intentionally or not, it has its own bittersweet sensation, as things flop out of the frying pan and into the fridge. When no light is promised, all she can do is command it.
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Taylor Alatorre: I too spent much of my twenties trying to flatten out my insecurities and shortcomings by putting them through the wringer of a larger political project. It didn’t work out so well, the personal or the political. That doesn’t mean it was all a waste of time, of course, as ineffective altruism is better than none at all. Likewise, the existence of RAYE’s “Genesis.” is undoubtedly a social good, even as I have next to no desire to re-listen to it. It’s didacticism in search of a lesson plan, which might’ve earned some poignancy if that’s where RAYE had decided to leave things: a generation fumbling around for answers, finding none, having to get up the next day despite that. As a recovering party animal, though, she just can’t abide the silence, and so the Song About Nothing is in the end forced to become About Something, to strike up the band and clap for the NHS and belatedly point the camera somewhere other than the singer’s navel. Part III is the best-sounding part of “Genesis,” but its connection to the whole is the most tenuous, and it feels neither like a triumphant finish nor a new beginning, but an ill-fitting interlude to some phantom utopia, to which I hope the rough sketches here don’t do justice.
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Mark Sinker: Spent a morning a couple of weeks back failing to persuade my cousin (83, serious Miles Davis fan) that present-day music isn’t as boring as the radios in the cabs to the hospital have convinced him it is. Perhaps I should send him a link to my old friend Marcello’s ecstatic piece on this very song, in which he calls 2024 a “quite remarkable year for songs” (with this at its centre-piece and validation)… Marcello is my age, or very nearly, and like my cousin loves jazz and knows it well; and jazz is the song’s unapologetic third section. As for me, I was certainly absolutely drawn into the sweet grim-dark of parts one and two, with their deft verbal asymmetries and their anecdotal frankness (if RAYE blanks out the metaphorical phrase “give a fuck,” she fully voices the graphic and literal verb “screwed”) (and of course it’s not just literal). All this I found strong and compelling, touching and boldly handled — though maybe not (as an ageing industrial-culture post-punker who lived for years a stone’s throw from the Throbbing Gristle noise-factory) entirely unheard-of. But part three? That blast of cheerful big band celebration? On first hearing that’s where I maybe found myself bailing a bit. Is this still working? Is it working equally well? What exactly’s my damage? Here’s some of it: in the ’80s when I was teaching myself about jazz soup-to-nuts, much of its history had become encased in a pitiless glaze of cool. I enjoyed its odder reaches, and getting my head round its histories and lineage and the reasons for its twists and turns — but I was very often also flinching at the way it was then talked about; all the pedantry, all the reverenced great names, all the “iconic” photos on the LP sleeves, all the hand-me-downs from hipster’s hipsters glibly repackaged for reasons half-noble and half-valid; all the rhetorical tricks deployed to punch a little space for time in a very populated pop space. Plus I was doing that thing that writers often do when they find themselves in a big joyful throng and are anxious not to hand over the last element of their critical reserve to the collective. This is nice, I would think, this is fine — look at me applauding it, but also look at me not throwing myself into it. And then watching the video one further time through the sound and the idea and the third stretch came round again, as it switches from dance and darkness in the theatre to the band arrayed along a South London railway station platform, all these school kids of many shapes and sizes, none of them anywhere cinched for screen perfection, and all these even smaller kids happily dancing and smiling among the watching normie audience… and suddenly I was in floods of tears. Here RAYE was so unashamedly hymning to those who carry the national health service, overstretched and underpaid as they are, and here we were in daylight so far from the terror of the pandemic (which they had the handling of) and so far too from all the earlier art and dark glamour and drama… as small new people a tenth my age are coming upon and loving this supposed ancient frozen-iconic music (itself once the very height of art and dark glamour and drama), and it isn’t really about carrying something off at all. RAYE calls it “light” because she’s expressing it through a particular faith; I guess I’d call it “life”? It’s what my cousin — who is semi-bereaved and not very well — is reaching for; it’s the spine of the whole song. And I’m still not sure how much I like it, but I love what it’s doing. 
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Nortey Dowuona: The reality of being an artist means you have to leave everything you believe at the door. Once you have decided to become one, nothing else matters. Your ability to be useful politically puts you either in the margins if you’re honest or in the grave if you’re brave. The most frightening moments of your life become pored over by weirdo dimwits in countries you have barely seen or won’t visit. Your personal relationships become mines you excavate until you are empty. You sign away your ability to live to a faceless corporation you barely know that clings to you long after you no longer remember why you even look out at a sea of other exploited, lonely souls who wish to be swept away from the crushing dread and despair they live inside once the lights are shut off, the speakers are packed away and the last roadie can sleep. When I heard “Genesis” I froze up. The millions who finished it and listened again know. They relate, they empathize, but now they know. And all the men know too. And so does her mother. And then we keep digging in. Now I know you’re trying to kill herself with all the coping mechanisms we have justified for ourselves for years. Now I know you slim your pictures on instagram. The bridge could be a whole album, but it’s a bridge and RAYE moves on. Then, to keep us from all keeling over she gives us the sterling recreation of 1920’s jazz that came from black women in the United States that was brought over to the UK and Europe electrifying the Ghanaians and Jamaicans and the Senegalese and the Palestinians and Yemeni people and Lapita people. The devil works hard like our livers, but he is not real. Rachel Agatha Keen is.
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