“Where Is My Husband!” Inside the Song That Made Raye All The Rage

It all began with a question: “Baby, where the hell is my husband?”

It was top of mind for Raye when she started crafting the biggest song of her career, a dramatic, all-too-relatable outcry as the 28-year-old seeks out the one person who can finally end her loneliness.

“Specifically, the title stemmed from feeling extremely single and just feeling genuinely like, ‘Where Is My Husband’ would be a good starting point for the vibe lyrically,” Raye tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Clearly, the sentiment resonated. The soul-pop track has surpassed a billion Spotify streams thanks to its catchy chorus, with Raye asking: “What is taking him so long / to find me-e-e.” The song first found virality on TikTok as millions of users picked “Where Is My Husband!” to soundtrack playful videos about their girls’ nights out searching for partners in stores, bars, sporting events and, ironically, their own weddings.

“This has ended up as a wedding anthem,” Raye says with a laugh. “I feel like I can’t go a single day without seeing someone in a wedding dress to this song, but that’s so beautiful.”

Mike Sabath, Raye’s longtime record producer and co-writer on the track, says the chorus “pretty much arrived immediately” once the pair got to Big Bear, California, where they began working on her second album, This Music May Contain Hope.

“What tends to happen with how Mike and I create is we’ll get the foundation solid and then we will spend a long time prodding and picking, trying, undoing, deleting, adding,” Raye explains of their collaboration process. “We love to just exhaust every possibility of what something could be because you just have to know, ‘OK, we tried everything, and this is what we’re happy with.’ ”

The duo weren’t afraid to play around with different styles on “Where Is My Husband!,” from the lyrics to the arrangement, such as incorporating brass and big band jazz elements in addition to layers of strings and retro-modern R&B touches.

For the lyrics specifically, they pivoted from rapid-fire, tongue-twister conversation delivery in the verses to the anthemic sing-along melody in the chorus. Raye admits she put herself “through the wringer” with this album overall “because I wanted us to be able to read the lyrics out without any melody and feel still moved by them.”

But when it came to “Where Is My Husband!,” she tried not to take herself too seriously. “It was more operating from a place of wanting it to feel quite funny and slapsticky and have a tongue-in-cheek kind of vibe,” she says, “I think especially in that bridge, which almost feels like a musical.”

The bridge took fans on not only a sonic journey but also a visual one, which resulted in its own viral TikTok dance trend that features people pointing to their ring finger, similar to Raye’s dance in the track’s music video. “I would like a ring, I would like a ring / I would like a diamond ring on my wedding finger / I would like a big and shiny diamond that I can wave around,” she croons.

As Raye and Sabath neared putting the final touches on the track ahead of its September 2025 release, they debuted the song live instead, getting direct feedback from fans during her set at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival three months earlier. The crowd reaction was positive enough that when they went back to finish the record, they added some of the audience cheers to the beginning.

“That was a very special and unique pocket of finishing the record because it’s rare that you really get the out-on-the-road feedback to literally continue editing the song,” Sabath says.

Once the tune was officially released, it quickly topped the U.K. official charts. It had a much slower rise in the U.S., however, opening at just 90 on the Hot 100 before making a steady climb all the way to 11 in April. It’s her highest-charting song in America.

Given that This Music May Contain Hope is structured around the four seasons, Raye called it particularly fitting for “Where Is My Husband!” to become a contender for song of the summer, given that the track was intended to kick off the album’s summer section.

“It was just really exciting getting to create in such a wide sonic landscape,” Raye says. “And I was really excited about this idea of seasons … so I just think it felt natural that ‘Where Is My Husband!’ would be in that summer vibe.”

Following the song’s global takeover, has Raye made headway in finding her unknown spouse?

“You would think doing a worldwide ‘Where Is My Husband!’ campaign would’ve pushed the dial a little bit,” she says with a laugh. “I’m sitting here in my hotel room alone.”

Raye has already shared that she doesn’t plan to write another album until she falls in love, as she feels she’s never truly written a love song and “really want[s] that to be the subject of that album.”

So will she ever answer her own question that inspired her biggest hit: “Where the hell is my husband?”

She quips that it “would be cute” to reveal the answer via a song on her next album, teasing with a laugh, “Here is the husband. Who knows? I won’t rule it out.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.