On ‘Blue Island,’ the artist responds to a profession plot twist by getting into the previous
Blue Island is the third studio album by Ravyn Lenae, and the primary for the reason that unlikely viral breakout of her music “Love Me Not.”
Cairo Dipika
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Cairo Dipika
Within the pop music sphere, there was an concept that the artist creating the music was the hitmaker, as if it was a divine present to see into the collective unconscious. Lately, it’s extra typically the audiences that make songs into hits themselves. Take “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae, a soulful soft-rock music from a curious, dynamic artist who appeared destined for a extra area of interest profession path earlier than the web stepped in. A single from Lenae’s 2024 album, Hen’s Eye, “Love Me Not” wasn’t successful till TikTok made it so — because of a viral mashup pairing the music with Solange’s “Dropping You” that pushed it to No. 5 on the Billboard Sizzling 100 and No. 7 on the World 200. To be clear, “Love Me Not” is gorgeous and deserving, with all the fitting elements to resonate broadly with listeners. However it’s obvious that funding within the music had much less to do with tracing inspiration again to its creator and extra with embracing the short-term craze, a type of unwitting cooperative motion. The hit shortly grew to become a sword of Damocles over Lenae’s head: What do you do with hype that is not exactly for you?
The best way to face the viral curve has grow to be, with larger frequency, one of the crucial vital decisions a rising artist could make. Some chase the highs of virality and miss — like Tommy Richman, whose electro-funk breakout “Million Greenback Child” went viral across the similar time, and who has since seen lesser, interchangeable emulator singles wither on the vine. After dominating the charts with “A Bar Music (Tipsy),” country-rap star Shaboozey lately launched an idea document designed to legitimize his outlaw bona fides, seemingly much less involved with the charts than along with his place within the nation continuum. On her new album, Blue Island, Lenae follows neither path, opting to bypass the pressures of virality by retreating into retromania.
Blue Island is called for town within the Chicago space the place Lenae grew up, and it finds the singer reaching for the acquainted amid profession upheaval. She reunites with producer Dahi, her collaborator for many of Hen’s Eye, for what in some methods is Love Me Not: The Album, tapping into classic touchstones for nostalgic songs that search consolation in bygone romance. “I pictured us getting older / I pictured us, however I get it now / I used to be hanging on to potential / I pictured you shifting nearer / Simply 17, would’ve settled down,” she sings on “Potential.” She sees the ghosts of a pale love wherever she goes on “In & Out,” and laments the crushing weight of distance on “Obstacles.” Combined in with the pining are songs about testing the boundaries set earlier than her as a performer. On the Doechii-assisted “Babygirl,” Lenae offers herself a pep speak: “Breakin’ them partitions / Babygirl, why undergo the window? / Might by no means be improper even in the event you do not go whеre all people goes.”
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Breaking partitions could be the final level of Blue Island, a minimum of the place musical affect is anxious. Lenae acknowledged a kitchen-sink angle in an interview with Paste, counting Blondie, The Sundays, Nelly Furtado, Madonna and Lykke Li among the many album’s guides: “It is a large bag of random s*** that I like to drag from,” she mentioned. To her credit score, that is greater than easy pastiche; there’s a clear try to combine sounds from alongside that wide-ranging palette into her current shade scheme, a wispy but heat mixture of soft-spun soul, pastel artwork pop and wide-eyed indie rock. Take the swaying sophisti-pop of “Acquainted Desires” or the bleached jangle of “Bobby” as proof of her talent at reshaping sounds of the previous like a glassblower, manipulating their type with breath and warmth till they resemble different translucent items in her assortment. However regardless of her finest efforts, Lenae generally finds herself pulled beneath by that vortex of her influences, prisoner to the mould she yearns to interrupt.
In 2024, I wrote this about Hen’s Eye and the paradox confronted by Black artists labeled as “alt-R&B”: “Even in our supposedly genreless time, it’s underestimated how a lot style nonetheless elements into the notion of a document — what it is doing and who it is for — and R&B of all sorts carries sure signifiers with it. These signifiers can reduce each methods: Typically R&B diehards see venturing past its borders as a betrayal, seemingly as a result of so many exterior these bounds do not present respect.” Blue Island makes clear that R&B is an enclosure from which the artist nonetheless longs to flee. “I am not gonna make an album stuffed with R&B songs simply since you need that,” she advised Paste. “I am rejecting that as a result of I do not suppose it is truthful for artists to really feel like they’ve to come back in a method and keep that method. It’s best to develop and evolve.”
That mission has led her to a contradictory place: Evolution is ahead improvement, and Blue Island largely strikes alongside erstwhile musical milestones. She has mentioned outright that the ’80s is the period she needs she might expertise herself; that is her residing vicariously, her intentions introduced by the new-wave wash of electronics and poppy drums on opener “Deal with.” That is an album so set on separating itself from R&B as a signifier that it has to spend a lot of its time on its again foot.
Whereas Blue Island is undoubtedly essentially the most omnivorous Ravyn Lenae album, its ambitions are practically as retrograde as they’re impressed, and the document feels barely hamstrung by a transparent wrestle with how her music has been perceived, given the elevated variety of eyes and ears on her. She advised Dazed that when “Love Me Not” reached a much bigger viewers, “I felt like there have been occasions when my identification was picked aside. My Blackness was questioned with regard to the kind of music I appreciated to make.” Because of making an attempt to seize the reins of her profession and identification, she has maybe discovered herself justifying her existence to those that misunderstand her, listeners who seemingly solely had a passive relationship together with her music within the first place. “I am transitioning into an artist that’s extra convicted in my style, my means and my physique,” she mentioned. “With every album I study extra about how I wish to be acquired.”
Studying what sort of artistry you want to challenge to the world is admirable, and arguably a key a part of the inventive course of. Nonetheless, Lenae leans so closely into declaring her style that Blue Island loses a few of the singular charms of her first two information. It’s not as targeted as its predecessors, or as refined. It feels much less like self-actualization and extra like an assertion of her fastidiously curated pursuits. After all, it is doable for such an enterprise to light up an artist’s character and resourcefulness, however right here the larger precedence is functioning as a focused response to ready-made stereotypes. It is positive that she would not wish to be confined inside the R&B field, however she needn’t run from these ties both. Black artists typically get so self-conscious in regards to the notion of their Black musical expertise that they find yourself defining themselves towards a white canon, which is simply as thorny. In wrestling with that notion, Lenae finds herself in a tunnel of her personal making.
The sunshine on the finish of that tunnel is the nearer, “Let Us In.” It is a music particularly about desirous to explode the notion that Black artists needs to be pressured to be anybody factor. However it’s not specific in its expression of that concept, as an alternative utilizing an evening out as a metaphor and merely reveling within the freedom of exploration, each lyrically and sonically. The observe is essentially the most daring of Lenae’s experiments, pushing previous its host of influences towards an infused electro-pop future distinctly of her unique design. On an album stuffed with defiant strikes, it’s the first second she appears really free from the viewers’s judgment.
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