The Sea

Made after the sudden death of her husband, Corinne Bailey Rae's second album turns private grief into something spacious and unflinching, trading the coffee-shop warmth of her debut for open water.

"Are You Here" opens the record with a question that never gets an answer, her voice small against guitar that keeps drifting rather than resolving. She lets songs stretch and stall where a pop instinct would tidy them up, and "I'd Do It All Again" earns its swell precisely because she sings it as a woman who knows what the cost was. Even her cover of Hendrix's "Little Wing" arrives less as tribute than as someone reaching for a familiar melody in the dark. The result is a mourning that never asks for pity, only for you to sit in the room while it happens.