Multi-platinum independent global pop star RAYE – one of the most streamed artists and revered songwriters in the world – shares her intoxicating new single and video for “Black Mascara.”
RAYE shares how a painful past experience inspired “Black Mascara”:
This song is about another story that has contributed to my ‘blues’. I used the juxtaposition of an upbeat dance track to tell this awful story of being misled by someone I really loved and trusted. While it was a dark low moment, it was also cathartic for me. The lyric ‘once you see my black mascara run from me to my mother’s hands’ is me saying, ‘if only you could actually see the damage that’s been done.’
But I don’t want the story to end there, it’s meant to be empowering, to lend a voice to women like me who may have experienced their own blues in this 21st century. That’s what my album is about really – tackling all of those blues that we experience as a generation. Ironically, this is the only upbeat dance track on the album, but I used my voice this time to tell a raw unfiltered story.
“Black Mascara” is the second single released from RAYE this year following her triumphant return earlier this summer with bold comeback single, “Hard Out Here“, which marked her official debut as an independent artist as well as her first solo release in over a year after racking up nearly 3 billion cumulative streams across her solo catalog.
