Across 19 tracks, including six meditative interludes titled “Recall,” Cosmos Ray’s debut album ‘The More We Live’ unfolds like a ritual of remembering.
Stream: ‘The More We Live’ – Cosmos Ray
Every once in a while, a debut album emerges that doesn’t just mark a new voice.
It disrupts the very language we use to talk about music. The More We Live, the first solo offering from Chicago’s Cosmos Ray, is exactly that kind of disruption. It’s expansive and unrelenting, but also quiet and tender. It’s the sound of one man digging through the wreckage of the self, and finding gold.
The More We Live, is a sonic journey, a spiritual document, and a masterclass in emotional storytelling. Blending the grit of hip-hop, the depth of soul, the pulse of reggae, and the atmosphere of ambient electronica, Ray crafts a sound world that feels wholly his own. And yet, there’s something universally human in it too; a reckoning with love, grief, transformation, and the fragile beauty of being alive.
Throughout the 19 tracks, Ray constructs a world of healing, resistance, remembrance, and transformation. Fusing genres with ease and honesty, from hip-hop to ambient, soul to electronic, reggae to rock, he creates a sound that feels both deeply personal and radically expansive.
The album opens with “Recall – Being Human,” a meditation acting as a portal in a cinematic, restrained, and resonant way. It sets the tone with quiet courage, offering not answers but invitations. Ray asks us to remember ourselves before he shows us what’s to come.
Fierce, charged, and grounded in today’s digital anxieties, “Paranoia” turns systemic fear into a rallying cry. With hard-hitting 808s and political fire, Ray balances lyrical sharpness with sonic ambition, creating protest music for a hyper-surveilled generation.
A standout in its genre-fusion and emotional punch, “When You’re Gone (conversations with my selves)” feels like Parliament in a therapist’s office. Ray wrestles with fragmentation and self-doubt in a groove that’s as funky as it is existential. The result is a wildly inventive soundscape that’s both heavy and hypnotic.
A welcome moment of reprieve, “Waking Breath” is a choral balm for the soul. Spiritual, floaty, and ethereal, it honors stillness without losing momentum. Ray’s voice glides here, gentle, assured, and reverent, grounding the listener in grace.
“Recall – The Apologists” is short but essential; this interlude shifts the tone. It’s a moment of foreshadowing, carrying quiet irony and deep unease. Philosophical in its brevity, it lays the foundation for the record’s most searing critiques.
“Sin Tax” is a sonic sermon with a satirical edge, while being bold, brilliant, and beautifully conflicted. Gospel, grime, and soul blend into a genre-defying sound that interrogates moral capitalism and spiritual commodification. It’s smart, layered, and audacious.
“Recall – The Circle of Faults” is a hypnotic interlude that reduces societal dysfunction to five searing words: judgment, contempt, anger, shame, and blame. Stark and looped, it reflects both the simplicity and complexity of our emotional cycles. A haunting mirror held to both the personal and political.
“Heavy (the blame is)” is arguably one of the most emotionally devastating tracks on the album. The track is a soul-funk confessional that aches with raw vulnerability. Ray’s performance is magnetic; he doesn’t just sing the weight of blame, he carries it with you.
“It Is What It Is” is a light-footed but deeply philosophical, and embodies the grace of acceptance. Its synth-pop groove creates a space to dance your way through detachment, turning resignation into release. It’s one of the album’s most surprising joys.
“Recall – The Givers” is a heartbeat in audio form. The track feels ancestral, pulsing with quiet strength. It reframes generosity not as sacrifice, but as a form of resistance and reclamation. Another reminder that even small moments of care are revolutionary.
“The More We Live” is the centerpiece and soul of the album. Expansive, cosmic, and full of heart, the title track is an emotional anthem. With sweeping vocals and layered textures, Ray brings his full vision into focus: to love more is to live more. It’s a mantra, a mission, and a masterpiece.
Dreamy and poetic, “Free 2 Birds” feels like a lucid dream. Its floating production and tender vocals offer listeners a chance to exhale, to believe in softness, self-love, and freedom. It’s a moment of personal flight within the collective journey.
Then we come to “Recall – The Redeemed.” Here, redemption is not a destination but a decision. This interlude glows with quiet revolution. It reminds us that healing is a process, not a performance. The sound design is minimal but emotionally potent: a gentle hand placed on your back.
Few dare to reinterpret Björk, but Ray reimagines “Unravel” as a grief-soaked electronic requiem. It’s reverent yet radically his own; soaring, aching, and spiritually charged. A deeply respectful, yet boldly transformative tribute.
Where the original glowed with shoegaze melancholy of “Fade into You” by Mazzy Star, Ray’s version shimmers with soultronica intimacy. Synths swell, bass glides, and emotion bleeds through every note. It aches, yes. But it moves, inviting a new kind of connection.
“Reluctant Healers” sits quietly as one of the album’s most honest. No grand climax, no neat resolution, just the raw, real journey of trying to heal. Ray strips it down emotionally and sonically, offering a balm to anyone still trying to become whole.
“Let Your Hair Hang Down” is a warm breeze of a track, soft, lyrical, and grounded in joy. It carries the wisdom of ancestors wrapped in melody. Ray reminds us that healing isn’t just shadow work: it’s also rest, pleasure, and being fully, unapologetically alive.
In just six lines, this final “Recall” interlude, “Recall – We Can All Be Free” lands like scripture. It distils the album’s message into something simple and profound: liberation is a choice. A stunning example of how few words can say everything.
The album closes not with closure, but with connection. “We Are with Them” is a dancehall-rooted anthem of unity and urgency. It rejects binaries and isolation in favor of collective power. It’s a final rally cry, an offering, a reminder: We’re never alone.
The More We Live is an extraordinary debut – not just because of its ambition, but because of its emotional precision.
Ray doesn’t just genre-bend; he genre-heals. Each track is a piece of something greater: A ritual, a reckoning, and a release. This is not background music; this is foreground music. Music to live through. Music to live with.
Ray hasn’t just made an album; he’s made a sanctuary. And in doing so, he invites us all to live more deeply, more fully, and, most of all, more together.
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:: stream/purchase The More We Live here ::
:: connect with Cosmos Ray here ::
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Stream: ‘The More We Live’ – Cosmos Ray
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© 2025The More We Live
an album by Cosmos Ray
