Absolutely Is The Answer

The future face of UK R&B has never sounded more sure on her second album, Paracosm.

Published on March 2, 2026

by Cam Delisle

Photos by Yang Han

Do you know what a paracosm is? I didn’t until I met 22-year-old British singer-songwriter Absolutely (born Abby-Lynn Keen), who’s not only made a convincing case for niche vocabulary in pop music – her debut album is called CEREBRUM – but decided that it should also title her second album.

According to her, a paracosm consists of “Fantastical lands, worlds, characters, and places that you create as a child that extend through to your adulthood.” She says it matter-of-factly. The word sounds ornate; her explanation doesn’t. While the album mirrors that restraint, it’s careful not to romanticize its own interiority.

Before Keen had a record of her own, she was already a force behind-the-scenes in pop and R&B, writing for the likes of David Guetta, Anitta, Normani, and Teddy Swims, while also showing up on collaborations with Tinashe and MARINA. Odds are, a hook that you know verbatim has her byline. She’s also freshly anointed pop mainstay RAYE’s younger sister, though her résumé predates any family spotlight, and the same exacting touch that she honed while writing for others underpins Paracosm completely.

Writing for other artists came with its perks, however. “I just put myself in their shoes and let them take the lead… In that way, it can be so much easier sometimes,” she says, with the authority of someone who, until now, has made a career out of “ghostwriting” hits. Writing for herself, though, demanded the flexing of a different muscle. “It’s an entirely different headspace. I have to think a lot more intentionally about things.” On Paracosm, that meant exhuming ideas she’d left to gather dust, wrestling with lost files after multiple accidental hard-drive wipeouts, and running experiments on production tools that had previously lived only in notebooks.

What Paracosm ultimately grew out of, she says, was less a lightning bolt than claustrophobia. “The album birthed from a moment of feeling stuck, feeling like I was putting myself in a box.” For someone whose creative life began in imagined worlds with their own rules, the confinement wasn’t dramatic so much as incremental: a creeping awareness that instinct had been replaced by optics. “I was thinking about what my team wanted, what a single would sound like, how would people perceive this music or understand it?” she recalls.

It’s a quintessentially modern spiral – the artist as both creator and focus group – and one she knows intimately after years of tailoring songs to fit other people’s silhouettes. “I eventually realized that I didn’t start making music for other people. I made it because I loved it, and because I felt freedom in creating when I was a child.” Paracosm, in turn, reads as a deliberate attempt to make room for instinct, the kind of imaginative sprawl that doesn’t always test well but feels undoubtedly true.

The album’s first track, “Natural Disaster,” introduces a muzzled, gusty intensity, her voice bleeding through elemental synths before shivering into breathless insistence. On “No Audience,” she imagines empty seats in a theatre – “Nobody watching, wouldn’t that be freer?” – moving with the same freewheeling inventiveness and wonder that runs through the album. Highlights “Painting by Numbers” and “Simple Things” pair lush keys with bubbling soundscapes, reflecting her realities with intentionally restrained intimacy.

Music has always been something Absolutely was “naturally drawn towards,” though in her early childhood that pull competed with other creative outlets. Fashion and design became her “safe space” for creativity: “It was more of a ‘I don’t want to copy my sister’ kind of thing. So I would just be like, ‘Oh, I’ll just be a fashion designer.’” For a while, that felt like enough. But in her words, “I think when I was 12 or 13, I just couldn’t deny that I loved singing.” That early moment of surrender became the backbone of her music: precise, with imagination running just wild enough to stay grounded.

These days, she’s part of RAYE’s This Tour May Contain New Music – an arena-sized, global run of shows that finds her in Glasgow, where she joins me over Zoom. The tour is as much a family affair as a headline run: both Absolutely and their sister Amma open the shows each night. It’s a dynamic that would have felt improbable to her younger self. “I used to be so scared of performing, especially on my first tour with my sister,” she admits, that familiar mixture of awe and intimidation still fresh in her voice. Now, however, that fear reads as a personal victory. “Looking at how far I’ve come and how much more freedom I have on stage is really inspiring to me.”

Prior to Paracosm, her stage name, Absolutely, almost felt aspirational – figuring out what it meant to be absolutely herself, absolutely in control of her sound, and absolutely unbothered by expectation. Now, she’s never seemed more sure. It’s no secret that it can be hard to exist in the shadow of somebody else – to have a family name and a precedent hovering over every note you sing. This record, however, manages to turn Absolutely from a cheeky moniker into a name that finally means exactly what it says, leaving (absolutely) no room for “maybe.