In the pop music sphere, there used to be an idea that the artist creating the song was the hitmaker, as if it was a divine gift to see into the collective unconscious. These days, it is more often the audiences that make songs into hits themselves. Take "Love Me Not" by Ravyn Lenae, a soulful soft-rock song from a curious, dynamic artist who seemed destined for a more niche career path before the internet stepped in. A single from Lenae's 2024 album, Bird's Eye, "Love Me Not" wasn't a hit until TikTok made it so — thanks to a viral mashup pairing the song with Solange's "Losing You" that pushed it to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 7 on the Global 200. To be clear, "Love Me Not" is lovely and deserving, with all the right components to resonate broadly with listeners. But it is apparent that investment in the song had less to do with tracing inspiration back to its creator and more with embracing the short-term craze, a kind of unwitting cooperative movement. The hit quickly became a sword of Damocles over Lenae's head: What do you do with hype that isn't precisely for you?
How to face the viral curve has become, with greater frequency, one of the most important choices a rising artist can make. Some chase the highs of virality and miss — like Tommy Richman, whose electro-funk breakout "Million Dollar Baby" went viral around the same time, and who has since seen lesser, interchangeable emulator singles wither on the vine. After dominating the charts with "A Bar Song (Tipsy)," country-rap star Shaboozey recently released a concept record designed to legitimize his outlaw bona fides, seemingly less concerned with the charts than with his place in the country continuum. On her new album, Blue Island, Lenae follows neither path, opting to circumvent the pressures of virality by retreating into retromania.
Blue Island is named for the city in the Chicago area where Lenae grew up, and it finds the singer reaching for the familiar amid career upheaval. She reunites with producer Dahi, her collaborator for most of Bird's Eye, for what in some ways is Love Me Not: The Album, tapping into vintage touchstones for nostalgic songs that seek comfort in bygone romance. "I pictured us getting older / I pictured us, but I get it now / I was hanging on to potential / I pictured you moving closer / Just 17, would've settled down," she sings on "Potential." She sees the ghosts of a faded love wherever she goes on "In & Out," and laments the crushing weight of distance on "Barriers." Mixed in with the pining are songs about testing the boundaries set before her as a performer. On the Doechii-assisted "Babygirl," Lenae gives herself a pep talk: "Breakin' them walls / Babygirl, why go through the window? / Could never be wrong even if you don't go whеre everybody goes."
Breaking walls may be the ultimate point of Blue Island, at least where musical influence is concerned. Lenae acknowledged a kitchen-sink attitude in an interview with Paste, counting Blondie, The Sundays, Nelly Furtado, Madonna and Lykke Li among the album's guides: "It's a big bag of random s*** that I like to pull from," she said. To her credit, this is more than simple pastiche; there is a clear attempt to integrate sounds from along that wide-ranging palette into her existing color scheme, a wispy yet warm combination of soft-spun soul, pastel art pop and wide-eyed indie rock. Take the swaying sophisti-pop of "Familiar Dreams" or the bleached jangle of "Bobby" as evidence of her skill at reshaping sounds of the past like a glassblower, manipulating their form with breath and heat until they resemble other translucent pieces in her collection. But despite her best efforts, Lenae sometimes finds herself pulled under by that vortex of her influences, prisoner to the mold she yearns to break.
In 2024, I wrote this about Bird's Eye and the paradox faced by Black artists labeled as "alt-R&B": "Even in our supposedly genreless time, it is underestimated how much genre still factors into the perception of a record — what it's doing and who it's for — and R&B of all types carries certain signifiers with it. Those signifiers can cut both ways: Sometimes R&B diehards see venturing beyond its borders as a betrayal, likely because so many outside those bounds don't show respect." Blue Island makes clear that R&B is an enclosure from which the artist still longs to escape. "I'm not gonna make an album full of R&B songs just because you want that," she told Paste. "I'm rejecting that because I don't think it's fair for artists to feel like they have to come in one way and stay that way. You should grow and evolve."
That mission has led her to a contradictory place: Evolution is forward development, and Blue Island largely moves along erstwhile musical milestones. She has said outright that the '80s is the era she wishes she could experience herself; this is her living vicariously, her intentions announced by the new-wave wash of electronics and poppy drums on opener "Handle." This is an album so set on separating itself from R&B as a signifier that it has to spend much of its time on its back foot.
While Blue Island is undoubtedly the most omnivorous Ravyn Lenae album, its ambitions are nearly as retrograde as they are inspired, and the record feels slightly hamstrung by a clear struggle with how her music has been perceived, given the increased number of eyes and ears on her. She told Dazed that when "Love Me Not" reached a bigger audience, "I felt like there were times when my identity was picked apart. My Blackness was questioned in regards to the type of music I liked to make." As a result of trying to grab the reins of her career and identity, she has perhaps found herself justifying her existence to those who misunderstand her, listeners who likely only had a passive relationship with her music in the first place. "I'm transitioning into an artist that is more convicted in my taste, my ability and my body," she said. "With each album I learn more about how I want to be received."
Learning what kind of artistry you wish to project to the world is admirable, and arguably a key part of the creative process. Still, Lenae leans so heavily into declaring her taste that Blue Island loses some of the singular charms of her first two records. It is not as focused as its predecessors, or as refined. It feels less like self-actualization and more like an assertion of her carefully curated interests. Of course, it's possible for such an undertaking to illuminate an artist's character and resourcefulness, but here the greater priority is functioning as a targeted response to ready-made stereotypes. It's fine that she doesn't want to be confined within the R&B box, but she needn't run from those ties either. Black artists often get so self-conscious about the perception of their Black musical experience that they end up defining themselves against a white canon, which is just as thorny. In wrestling with that perception, Lenae finds herself in a tunnel of her own making.
The light at the end of that tunnel is the closer, "Let Us In." It's a song specifically about wanting to explode the notion that Black artists should be forced to be any one thing. But it is not explicit in its expression of that idea, instead using a night out as a metaphor and merely reveling in the freedom of exploration, both lyrically and sonically. The track is the most daring of Lenae's experiments, pushing past its host of influences toward an infused electro-pop future distinctly of her original design. On an album filled with defiant moves, it is the first moment she seems truly free from the audience's judgment.
Copyright 2026 NPR
