On Her New Album ‘Blue Island,’ Ravyn Lenae Proves She Can Do It All

Ravyn Lenae’s third album, Blue Island, starts with a bang. A series of bangs, actually, as if someone is knocking down a door before Lenae makes her thunderous entrance with the killer lead single “Handle”: a perfect slice of guitar-led pop-rock that features an earworm of a chorus, boisterously proclaiming that, well, maybe she isn’t for everyone. “Oh, my love, my love is like a landslide,” she sings in a gorgeous, spiraling melody over bouncy ’80s drums and record scratches. “Know I might be more than you could handle / When it all comes down, only one way to find out…”

For a long time, Lenae may indeed have felt she was more than mainstream audiences could handle. Hailing from the Chicago suburbs, she’s been releasing music for over a decade, beginning with underground R&B EPs and eventually leading to her first full-length album, 2022’s Steve Lacy and Kaytranada-assisted Hypnos, which landed on multiple year-end best-of lists, but didn’t quite get the traction she’d hoped for. Then came her 2024 follow-up, Bird’s Eye, which kicked off with the global smash hit (and TikTok-viral) single “Love Me Not,” and led to a stint supporting Sabrina Carpenter and a stratospheric rise to fame for Lenae.

Instead of riding that wave to work with blue-chip pop producers, however, Lenae saw it as an opportunity to take stock. Heading back to her hometown of Blue Island, Illinois (hence the album’s title), she regrouped with her longtime collaborator Dahi to make a record that reflects her personal growth during that whirlwind time, from coming to terms with the end of a long-term relationship to adjusting to the sudden rise of voices online telling her what she should do next and who she should be as an artist.

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.

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.

That sounds sensible. I was interested to read that after the whirlwind success of “Love Me Not,” you went back home and regrouped there. Then, you continued to work with your main producer from the previous record, Dahi, instead of heading off to work with big-name hitmakers. Why did that feel right for you?

I think, one: working with Dahi is such a magical experience, and I’m the type of person who, when I find something that just feels good and easy, I cling to it. He’s become a part of my family in a lot of ways. There’s some trust there that’s just built in. To have somebody believe in me as equally as I believe in myself is really special and rare, and to find someone willing to work as hard as I’m working—he just gets it. We’ve brought in other producers around the album who are so talented and add so much flavor and color to the records, but at the core of it, I need to have that constant. We worked on and recorded most of it at his home studio in LA, and there’s just something so nice about being in his house, and his kids come down and play with us for a little bit and twirl around and scream and bring him dinner. Something felt comforting about it.

Did that relationship or the environment you were making the music in feed into the vibe of the finished record?

Yeah. I think part of why our relationship is so special is because, even though there’s comfort there, there’s never complacency. We have this hunger to keep pushing. What was happening in my world was so big that it was hard not to let that follow me into the studio—between me singing “Love Me Not” everywhere and doing press and constant travel. On the days I wasn’t doing that, I was in the studio, and that was my time to reflect on what was going on around me because there was so much change happening that felt good and positive and robust. I was also getting out of a long-term relationship and trying to find what it feels like to be a pure individual in my personal life, but also in music—my audience changing and expanding, [encountering] new people and new conversations about my identity and my Blackness and how that relates to my music and what spaces I should sit in. It just opened the door to so much change and reflection of who I want to be and what I’m going for.

I read that you’d grown frustrated by some of the comments leveled at you online, trying to pigeonhole you within certain genres as a Black artist. Can you tell me a little more about how Blue Island reflects your response to those criticisms? I think you made a particularly important point in highlighting that the various genres you like to explore—rock ‘n’ roll, pop, dance music—all have their roots in Black communities.

I think it was super liberating for me to be able to feel confident enough to incorporate all my influences and all the things I like and listen to into my music, without overthinking what playlist this is going to land on or what type of crowd this will hit. I had to really eliminate all of that chatter. It doesn’t really matter. And also, when fans or listeners do reject me exploring my sound, I have to remind people that this is, first and foremost, music is for me, and I have to feel inspired. To feel that way, I have to keep changing it. I have to stay curious. That’s what makes it exciting for me and for people who are into me as an artist. And also, it opened up a really interesting conversation around Black ownership. I know that’s where a lot of the rejection is coming from. I understand the history of how Black artists have been positioned in music and whitewashed, or had certain genres taken from us… So I think it’s important for artists like me—and Kelela, Steve Lacy, Fousheé, Rachel Chinouriri, Doechii—to keep pushing the needle, like artists have done millions of times before us.