Check out pics of the rising star. RAYE photographed on April 10, 2026 at The Auditorium in Chicago. Gucci faux fur coat, earrings and heels. Jingyu Lin Trending on Billboard 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.…