After the alarmingly retro lyrics of “Where Is My Husband” and the balladry of “Nightingale Lane,” RAYE has at last offered a single from This Music May Contain Hope that is a bona fide return to form. Specifically, the form of what is considered her debut album, My 21st Century Blues (since Euphoric Sad Songs is considered but a “mini album”). And, more specifically still, the sound and innovation of “Escapism” featuring 070 Shake, which is what elevated RAYE to a new echelon of fame thanks to the track going viral on TikTok.
“Click Clack Symphony” has the potential to do the same, not just because of its occasionally interspersed “heels clacking” sound effects that are ripe for syncing them up to one’s own videos (or maybe just clips of Miranda Priestly walking into the office), but because it’s a certified banger. Which is a surprising classification to have when Hans Zimmer is listed as the featured artist. Then again, most every song he’s ever composed for a movie has been indelible, not least of which was The Lion King. So perhaps it’s only natural that this gift of his would translate into the realm of “pop music.” Not that RAYE really constitutes that genre in the more conventional sense. In fact, what she’s done for the genre has perhaps not been seen since Amy Winehouse.
Indeed, the comparisons that have been made to RAYE and Amy have been frequent enough for her to mention in “I Will Overcome,” a new song she performs during This Tour May Contain New Music. In it, RAYE belts out, “Funny some people say I/Remind them of Amy/Some spit through their keyboards/I’ll never amount/And the evil and insults/The arrows from your tongues/Are the same devils you tortured her with.”
As for RAYE, she seems perfectly capable of torturing herself throughout “Click Clack Symphony.” And it starts right from the get-go, with the “way existential” analogy, “Did you know the odds to be born on this Earth’s 1 in 400 trillion?/I conquered those odds yet I can’t conquer leaving the house.” This being a nod to the weight of depression RAYE feels on her shoulders, whether from a recent (enough) breakup or life in general. And if it is the former, it makes “Click Clack Symphony” a natural follow-up to the pain of “Nightingale Lane,” during which RAYE laments, “I watched him walk away/I’ve, I’ve dabbled in love since/Maybe every other summer/It never lasts long/They never stick around/I’m made of steel now.”
Even so, being that the record declares in its title that it may contain hope, RAYE is sure to incorporate that emotion into the sadness of her lyrics. And it’s no different for “Click Clack Symphony.” For after RAYE gets her “emo” feelings out of the way with, “I eat, sleep, scroll and work, but there has to be more than just merely existing” (or, as Stacie Orrico once said, “There’s gotta be more to life/Than chasing down every temporary high”), she then rallies by summoning “the girls” (which is part of what makes this a new-fangled Sex and the City theme song). For she’s “fiend[ing] for some feminine healing,” which means, “I called my girls and said, ‘SOS, pick a dress, pick a time and an address, for we are going out tonight.’”
Likening it almost to a kind of Bat-Signal, RAYE chants, “Send the call out, send the call out/Calling all my baddest womens, it’s about to go down,” followed by, “Who let the girls out?/I did, I did” (which feels like, of all things, a pointed reference to Baha Men’s only hit). Such lyrics indicating that the song is, beneath it all, a fundamental urging to reconnect with “third places.” To leave the house, disconnect from screens and get back to the tactile, community experience that “going out” once entailed. To that end, in the accompanying video, directed by Dave Meyers (hence, all the visual effects), RAYE conveys her loneliness just sitting or lying around (or even being in a bizarre, yoga-like pose involving a chair while facing her laptop and phone) at home. Or sometimes, even acting as the support portion of her coffee table, the same way FKA Twigs does in the video for “Perfect Stranger.” Of course, it seems Twigs’ homage to Allen Jones was more intentional than what RAYE is doing, though it’s telling that two Black women seem so keen on this particular piece of the British Pop Art movement.
Slowly “gathering herself,” in a sense, to prepare for leaving the house, another scene shows RAYE hosing herself off amidst a few clotheslines of lingerie prior to a scene of a TV screen with her face “on” it (or is it “in” it?) serving as a stand-in for her actual face (this done while RAYE sings, “I climb into my lonely throne before my TV/I feel alone, I feel like no one really needs me”). Yet another nod to how the more time one stays inside, the more they become “at one” with the screen. Luckily, she has a friend to help pull her out of her funk, with RAYE name-checking, “So thank you, Carly, for having a sixth sense and for calling to remind me/We don’t settle for depression on a Friday night” (though Lana Del Rey would beg to differ with her infamous “Born to Die” line, “I feel so alone on a Friday night”). As for “Carly,” RAYE joins the ever-burgeoning musical trend of a singer mentioning friends that no average listener immediately recognizes (e.g., Ariana Grande singing, “So I grab my stuff/Courtney just pulled up in the driveway” on “bye” or Charli XCX singing, “George says I’m just paranoid”).
As high-heeled women emerge from bushes and other places to run toward RAYE’s house and rescue her from “wanting to stay home and just be negative” (to use a phrase from Carrie Bradshaw when Charlotte York dragged her to a, let’s say, “affirmations” seminar), they proceed to pull her from her blanketed cocoon. This done while the chorus serves as a battle cry for going out even when you don’t want to. In other words, for fighting the temptation to turn ever more inward and isolated. And so it is that RAYE, at last “dressed to the nines” (by way of a surely Cruella-approved fur coat) starts to approach the front door. It is here that the signature style of Dave Meyers shines through again as RAYE suddenly looks very small in front of the large, looming door. A metaphor for how daunting it feels to overcome the hurdle of leaving the house when you feel you’re in no fit state (or, hell, even when you do).
Regardless, RAYE and her now miniature fellow friends aren’t going to be deterred as they take off their heels and use the points of them to dig into the wood of the door and climb up. This as RAYE insists, “She just needs/She needs a pep talk/She needs a hug, she needs a dance floor/She’s got one little life, she needs to get out of the house more and try to start living it.” And once RAYE, still in miniature form, moves through the keyhole of the door, she proceeds to do just that, now “life-size” again (once she’s on the other side) as she and her girls take to the street to dance (side note: there’s something about this scene that recalls Charli XCX and her coterie of it girls out on the street during the “360” video).
In the background, perched on the power lines behind them, are giant music notes. A recurring symbol that first appears at the beginning of the video, which showcases a very Old Hollywood kind of intro (complete with being in black and white). One wherein the music notes paraded look like high heels with an additional “weight” on them. A telling visual metaphor for this particular song, which is all about continuing dance (whether literally or figuratively) in the face of feeling emotionally weighed down.
When she says goodbye to her girls on the street while offering some of her signature “narration” (as she was also fond of doing for certain songs on My 21st Century Blues), she then grabs on to one of the music notes and treats it like a hang-glider/parachute as she floats to an entirely different part of town. One that is, to say the least, much more pastoral. In fact, as she starts running through the grass, it’s very much giving Maria (Julie Andrews) dancing and twirling on the hillside during the opening to The Sound of Music.
It’s a conclusion that offers RAYE looking happy despite her sadness, and knowing that “one day, she would again feel the sun,” as part of her concluding narration goes. Until then, she’ll keep “danc[ing] under the weight of her clouds.” A click clack symphony performed both solo and in the company of female allies who can help her through the rain (as Mariah would say).
