Corinne Bailey Rae “Black Rainbows” Album Review

Corinne Bailey Rae’s name is synonymous with her sunny, joyful 2006 hit “Put Your Records On.” Despite a number of EPs and a couple full-length albums, Rae has never fully escaped its upbeat sound and outlook. But on 2023’s Black Rainbows, Rae tears herself away from her previous work and produces an album of shocking proportions. Drawing from the Riot Grrrl punk movement, the indie scene, soul, and a number of other genres, Rae creates a dark and disconcerting universe of horror, lust, and a surreal cityscape.

Throughout Black Rainbows, Rae paints an intricate portrait of womanhood. Many of her songs are tinged with a subtle fear—as if its speaker is being followed by something nameless (“He Will Follow You With His Eyes”). Others are sorrowful remembrances of toxic relationships (“A Spell, A Prayer” and “Red Horse”), while some are celebrations of one’s ability to live a more free, empowered life in the city (the Blondie-esque punk song “New York Transit Queen”). It’s these juxtapositions that make Black Rainbows such a knuckle-whitening ride to listen to.

The LP’s narrative arc is as frantic and spontaneous as life in the city. It’s this chaos that makes the album so strong, reflecting Rae’s psyche as she tries to survive in New York. Rae begins the album with “A Spell, A Prayer,” which thrusts us immediately into the dark underbelly of Rae’s New York City. The song portrays the relationship she mourns for parts of the album as a sort of twisted fairy tale a lá Rumplestiltskin—the macabre fairytale character whose too-good-to-be-true offers always exact a cruel price. Accompanied by bursts of sparkling synths, Rae’s sweet, ominous vocals warn us “Don’t pick every thread,” suggesting that to dig too deeply into a past relationship might prove more painful than keeping your memories locked away.

The instrumental title track that follows “A Spell, A Prayer” is an entre into Rae’s chaotic consciousness, full of stripped down tacky drum loops, experimental keyboard jazz riffs, and gritty electric guitar. Rae then sucks us into the rage-filled punk of “Erasure,” an angry song battling the city’s anonymizing attempts to erase her as a Black woman from its surface both literally and figuratively before launching into “Earthlings,” which seems to live out these very fears. “Earthlings” is composed of tonal synths and autotuned, spacy vocals, as if Rae is being dissolved into the violence of the city. She then returns to the elegiac heartbreak of “Red Horse,” reminiscent of her lead-off tracks. These songs do a great job of introducing us to the interiority of Rae’s life in New York City, presenting an interesting portrait of someone trying to survive in one of the most overwhelming urban environments on earth.

Rae grounds herself on the album’s standout single “New York Transit Queen,” which is a poppy Riot Grrrl track in which Rae seems to take hold of her agency again and relishes in her power and confidence as a queen, rather than a lovelorn woman, or a dissolved soul in New York City.

Like the rest of the album, though, the power she gains in “Transit Queen” is then tested in “He Will Follow You With His Eyes.” Opening with a satirical advertisement for a beauty product which will make men follow you with their eyes, Rae enters into an unsettling song about the conditioning of the male gaze. She reflects on the way women are brainwashed into believing that the sexualized surveillance of their bodies is the romance they are meant to seek out. We are left to wonder whether this is what happened in the relationship she mourns in previous tracks. “He Will Follow You With His Eyes” is the most forceful song on the album, intelligently interrogating the false notion that the gaze of the surveiler is innocuous, even desirable. The production on the song is also excellent, moving from jazz guitar and muzak-esque flute in the ad portion of the track, to gritty synths and drums as Rae depicts the horror of being watched. The change from innocent inoffensive instrumentals to darker sounds perfectly parallels the thematic evolution of the song itself.

Perhaps from contrast with the strength of the preceding songs, the final tracks trail off a little bit. “Put it Down” has limp lyrics and tends to lag, and while “Peach Velvet Sky” is beautiful—especially after the darkness of what came before it—its jazzier sound is a bit out of place.

Rae’s first full-length album in seven years is her strongest. Black Rainbows is a gut punch. Her ruminations on womanhood are fleshed out emotionally and staggering in their complexity while also managing to create some fun and very digestible songs. Black Rainbows is by no means a light listen, and it isn’t an album to be put on in the background, but its ability to grab hold of you is one of its greatest strengths.

Tate McFadden is the Arts and Culture Editor and Opinion Editor for The Triton.

Correction: This article was updated at 2:45 p.m. on October 24 to add credits.