Songfacts®:

• This song describes the sad feeling of watching an ex with his arms around the tiny waist of another girl. Raye is the "Winter Woman" in this scenario, left in the cold.
  
  Months before releasing the song, Raye posted about it, offering this insight: "The sad feelings we wrestle with do make great songs I think, and considering this seems to be a chapter in my life where I am swimming through some personal aches and pains, I'd say this album is now beginning to move swimmingly. Every cloud."
• "Winter Woman" starts the "winter" section of Raye's 2026 album This Music May Contain Hope, which is divided into four seasons, each representing the different emotions put forth in the songs. The album starts with "autumn," where Raye can see the dark times ahead but looks for hope. The "winter" part gets pretty bleak, especially on this song, where it sounds like Raye is reaching her breaking point.
• The song uses elements of the "Winter" section from Vivaldi's violin concerto "The Four Seasons." Composed around 1720, the concerto is Vivaldi's most famous work, and the section used in the song is well known even to many who don't listen to classical music.
  
  It was Raye's co-writers on the song - Tom Richards and Chris Hill - who had the idea for inserting the classical section. This gave Raye the idea for the "seasons" concept of the album.
  
  "The seasons idea came quite late, in October 2025 in France, after Tom and I had put Vivaldi into 'Winter Woman,'" Chris Hill told Songfacts. "After that Raye started to arrange the album according to these seasons, and it all fit rather well!"
• Raye wrote the lyric (and the others on the album) as a third-person narrative with rich imagery that's largely fictional, but it's all unmistakably personal, dealing with a difficult time starting in 2021 when she was at odds with her record label and masking the pain with alcohol, a reference that shows up in these haunting lines:
  
  Tonight I kiss the bottle on the lips
  'Cause desperate times require desperate pleasure
• This is one of five tracks on the album that features The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Tom Richard. Along with Raye, Richards and Chris Hill, the song was also written by the American writer Toneworld (Marvin Hemmings), who also has credits on songs by Kali Uchis and Jessie J.