On Blue Island, her response to all that chatter seems to be: I can be any kind of artist I want to be. There are fabulous pop bangers like the second single, “Saturday Night,” with its shimmering synths and pulsing drum machines, in which she sings of encountering an ex-lover at a party and refusing to give in to temptation. (“Say you miss me on a Saturday night / But I’m still leaving without you,” she sings.) There are the angular, grungy electric guitars of “Handle” and the whirring, club-ready beats of album closer “Let Us In”; the stripped-back fingerpicked guitar of the indie-pop track “Reputation,” featuring Dominic Fike, and the neo-funk-meets-hip-hop thrill of “Babygirl,” to which Doechii contributed a handful of superb rap verses. On the warm, nostalgic “Never Let Me Go,” she pays a beautifully executed tribute to classic Chicago soul and doo-wop, eventually letting the strings and Wurlitzers and handclaps give way to a genuinely moving recording of her chatting with her grandparents.
Her impressive versatility and sense of curiosity do, however, make it rather hard to pin down what exactly makes a Ravyn Lenae song a great Ravyn Lenae song. What’s her view? She reels off a brief list: big, universal pop chords, hard-hitting beats that are a little off-kilter, chanty or anthemic melodies. And it’s really the latter that serve as a through line across the record—a classically trained vocalist, Lenae has an ear for the kind of strange but sticky melodies that elevate a good pop song to a truly great one. Even if you took away the production bells and whistles, you get the sense that these songs would be hits in any decade or genre. According to Lenae, that’s precisely the point. “I’m obsessed with how that happens with songs, and they live forever and ever and ever, or they feel uniquely universal,” she says. “That’s the magic I’m trying to find with every song.” On Blue Island, she finds that magic over and over and over again.
Here, Lenae talks to Vogue about the “comforting” environment she made the record in and why she refuses to be pigeonholed as a Black artist.
Vogue: How are you feeling about this record coming out, especially given the meteoric rise you’ve had since the last one? Does it feel different this time around?
Ravyn Lenae: It’s crazy. Every day it gets closer, the jitters start, and I have to tell myself, “It’s okay. Don’t be anxious.” That’s what I’ve been telling myself—even just this morning. I think each album has felt different, but there’s definitely been anxiety with all of them. And this one is coming off the heels of one of the most extraordinary moments of my career so far. So that creates a lot of excitement, but also expectation that has to be balanced out with just being happy and excited about the music coming out. I think with each one, I learn little tactics to relieve myself of the anxiety a little bit.
What are your tactics this time around?
With the last album, I realized that I don’t like not having something planned to do when the album comes out. So now I make sure that I have something that takes me away from my phone a little bit, because in the past I would literally just sit in my closet on the floor just reading comments all day, and that’s not the best way to start. [Laughs.] Even if it’s planning to go to Disneyland that day or planning to go to the movies or just dinner with my friends, I need to do something that feels human.