Raye has signed on to Benny Safdie's next film, Lizard Music, where she will write original music and voice a character. The adaptation, which mixes live action with CGI, is set for theaters on December 25, 2027.
Safdie wrote the script from Daniel Pinkwater's 1976 novel, a strange and much-loved book from an author who has spent decades writing for children and young adults. The cast around Raye's voice work is unusually deep: Dwayne Johnson, who also produces, alongside Theo Leber, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Arya Parvathi, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, David Krumholtz and Andrew Dice Clay.
The move follows her casting in Yann Demange's crime feature Lineage, and it arrives in a year that has already reshaped her standing. Her Mercury Prize win sent her album climbing from Number 88 to Number 11 in the midweek chart, and she marked the award with a Royal Albert Hall show backed by a full orchestra, a young people's vocal ensemble and members of her own family. The same week, Anna Lapwood opened a performance of "Where Is My Husband!" on the Albert Hall organ, having also played on "Click Clack Symphony."
What makes the Safdie project worth watching is the split in the job. Voicing a character puts her inside the film's fiction; writing its music puts her outside it, shaping how the whole thing sounds. Few artists get both assignments on the same production, and fewer still arrive at them from a career built on the kind of narrative songwriting that carried This Music May Contain Hope. Pinkwater's novel is a peculiar, funny, deeply odd book, and a score written by someone who has spent years learning how to place a story inside three minutes is a genuinely interesting proposition.
Her film work now runs in two directions at once: in front of the camera for Demange, and behind the sound of Safdie's adaptation. The release date is far off, but the pairing of a children's author's strangest book with a songwriter in the middle of her most visible year is the kind of detail that tends to outlast the announcement cycle. More on Raye is collected on ROMBO's artist page.
