Ravyn Lenae: “I now know what’s possible – but that just makes me hungrier”

“Oh, she’s up next”, reads a comment under a recent performance video of Ravyn Lenae online – a prophecy for a star-in-waiting.

‘Love Me Not’, a track from her 2024 album ‘Bird’s Eye’, might have seemed like a miraculous delivery on that promise when it scored viral success months after its initial release. But to those in the know, the Chicago-born artist has already been “it” for years. As a fixture of the Zero Fatigue collective and across two albums and three EPs, Lenae was a beloved figure in R&B and alt-pop long before the rest of the world caught up.

Today, Lenae is gearing up to release her third album ‘Blue Island’. Chatting with NME from a Warsaw hotel room, she’s laidback in leopard print, her signature red hair unmistakeable even on a Zoom screen. “A lot of the album was made during a really interesting time in my life,” she begins. “I was experiencing the biggest highs of my career whilst trying to manage the inevitable changes that came with it.”

After being catapulted from respected up-and-comer to the front row of pop with ‘Love Me Not’, she spent the next year performing the track “at every college in America” while adjusting to the new shapes of popstar life. The shift was seismic, coinciding with the end of a four-year relationship and bringing a mass of new listeners who viewed her through a very different lens: more passive, less familiar, even sceptical. “People were picking apart and questioning my identity and Blackness, and what kind of music I make,” she shares.

Lenae’s sound has always been a moving, undefinable thing, slipping seamlessly between R&B, neo-soul and indie. She counts genre-defying Santigold, OutKast and Pharrell among her north stars – artists who “infuse different genres to make something uniquely universal that can touch everyone”. Yet, that instinct collided with online discourse around ‘Love Me Not’, where purist fans questioned why she’d “do pop” while other listeners made it known they’d assumed she was white based on her sound alone. That scrutiny on her identity and artistry felt like a personal affront. “I had to do a lot of reconciliation of the self and what I ultimately want to say as an artist,” she reflects.

Of course, the whirlwind has been wonderful too. For one, it gave Lenae renewed confidence in her own creative vision, earned from “loud, vibrating validation from the world”: “Once you get that ‘Job well done, this works!’ you internalise that and take it into the studio with you. I don’t know if you can walk away from something like that unscathed, even in a positive way.”

‘Blue Island’ is the culmination of that internal work – a record suspended between arrival and unease. Named after the Illinois neighbourhood where she was born, the title anchors her to her roots, but also mirrors her current transition state. Growing up, her family mostly passed through Blue Island rather than it being a destination in its own right. It’s a fitting metaphor for an artist “caught between familiar and comfortable worlds in my past, and new worlds I could see in my future”.

That push and pull between states runs through tracks like ‘Saturday Night’ and ‘Familiar Dreams’, which wrestle between relationship nostalgia and moving forward. “During times of big change, you’re kind of forced to choose which of the two places you want to be,” she muses. “There’s something antsy and exciting in that in-betweenness; something scary about it.”

“I just want to stay close to my dreams And make space for myself to keep being a person in all of this”

She leaned into that tension musically, trusting her instincts completely, “throwing everything that I love into one bucket”. The result is perhaps her most experimental album yet. ‘Handle’ and ‘In & Out’ bring a buzzy rock energy, while the latter half drifts into late-’90s and 2000s pop (‘Barriers’, ‘Saturday Night’). ‘Potential’ goes even further into a metallic, almost J-pop territory. “No one’s made that connection,” she says, face lighting up. “I love that!”

Then there’s ‘Reputation’, a curious little vignette shared with Dominic Fike. “I always wanted that Rihanna and Mikky Ekko moment,” Lenae jokes, referencing ‘Stay’. “That song was always so cool to me. It showed us a version of Rihanna, existing naturally, beyond what we’d seen of her so far.”

The album’s rowdier, more “rambunctious” moments are intentional, capturing a sense of urgency she still feels about “where I’m sitting right now. Like, this major thing has happened for me, but I still feel like I have to knock down the door”.

After chasing a breakout moment her entire career, stepping into it sparked an unexpected scarcity mentality. “I felt like I couldn’t say no to anything,” she admits. The pressure showed up in oddly specific moments, like obsessively watching her Spotify live listeners climb toward 30,000 people simultaneously streaming ‘Love Me Not’, wondering what it would take to convert every single listener into a concert ticket. “I started getting really crazy up in my brain, wanting to ‘turn everybody’,” she reveals. “It’s this weird dichotomy where I now know what’s possible, but that just makes me hungrier.

“You almost create this factory for yourself, just pushing, pushing, pushing, without any sense of release. That can make it hard to be present or just feel proud of myself. That’s something I’m in therapy for,” she adds with a wry laugh.

If the album has a thesis, Lenae points to ‘Baby Girl’, her collaboration with Doechii. Delivering sentiments like “Breaking them walls / Babygirl why go through the window? / Could never be wrong / Even if you don’t go where everybody goes”, the track offers an intimate look at her experience as a Black woman who resists being “the most neatly packaged, accessible, easy thing”. Sharing this message with Doechii felt especially resonant. “That’s my sister,” she says warmly. “I feel so connected with artists who have a strong conviction in who they are. Doechii came out the gates that way; there was never a day when I didn’t believe she was exactly who she says she is.”

Beyond the music, that tension found a physical outlet in movement. The tactile, tightly-wound choreography in the ‘Handle’ video, developed with choreographer Akira Uchida, wasn’t a calculated pivot so much as a valve for catharsis. “It wasn’t any deliberate decision that ‘I need to do choreo now’,” she jokes. “Things just manifested themselves outwardly, in my body.” Having long assumed she wasn’t “that girl” enough for dance routines, Uchida’s work changed her mind: “I really connected with the shapes he was making; how dance can feel a little quirky and magical.”

Her broader artistic vision has only been sharpened by these few years of touring, from headlining festivals to arena support slots for Sabrina Carpenter and Reneé Rapp. “I started to ask myself different questions about the kinds of spaces I want my music to live [in]”, she says. Admitting to herself “I want to do arenas” pushed her toward a “bigger, chancier, more-in-your-face feeling” to the music. She plans to bring that feeling to life on her upcoming North American headline tour. “For the first time I have the resources to have stage design. I want people to walk away feeling like they were just in Blue Island.”

It’s that sense of arrival, finally, at the scale of the ambition she’s always carried, that sits at the centre of this chapter. Asked what she’d tell herself right after finishing ‘Bird’s Eye’,  before any of this, Lenae thinks for a moment, then shares her answer gamely. “I just want to stay close to my dreams,” she says. “And make space for myself to keep being a person in all of this.”

Ravyn Lenae’s ‘Blue Island’ is out on August 7 via Atlantic Records.

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