On ‘Blue Island,’ the artist responds to a profession plot twist by moving into the previous
Blue Island is the third studio album by Ravyn Lenae, and the primary because the unlikely viral breakout of her tune “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 tune was the hitmaker, as if it was a divine present to see into the collective unconscious. Nowadays, it’s extra usually the audiences that make songs into hits themselves. Take “Love Me Not” by Ravyn Lenae, a soulful soft-rock tune 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, Chook’s Eye, “Love Me Not” wasn’t successful till TikTok made it so — because of a viral mashup pairing the tune with Solange’s “Dropping You” that pushed it to No. 5 on the Billboard Scorching 100 and No. 7 on the World 200. To be clear, “Love Me Not” is beautiful and deserving, with all the best parts to resonate broadly with listeners. However it’s obvious that funding within the tune had much less to do with tracing inspiration again to its creator and extra with embracing the short-term craze, a sort of unwitting cooperative motion. The hit rapidly turned a sword of Damocles over Lenae’s head: What do you do with hype that is not exactly for you?
Methods to face the viral curve has develop into, with larger frequency, one of the crucial necessary 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 identical time, and who has since seen lesser, interchangeable emulator singles wither on the vine. After dominating the charts with “A Bar Tune (Tipsy),” country-rap star Shaboozey just lately launched an idea report 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 known as 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 Chook’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 “Boundaries.” Combined in with the pining are songs about testing the boundaries set earlier than her as a performer. On the Doechii-assisted “Babygirl,” Lenae provides herself a pep speak: “Breakin’ them partitions / Babygirl, why undergo the window? / May by no means be incorrect even if you happen to do not go whеre all people goes.”
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Breaking partitions stands out as the final level of Blue Island, at the least 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 massive bag of random s*** that I like to tug from,” she stated. 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 present 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 Goals” or the bleached jangle of “Bobby” as proof of her ability 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 typically finds herself pulled below by that vortex of her influences, prisoner to the mould she yearns to interrupt.
In 2024, I wrote this about Chook’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 components into the notion of a report — what it is doing and who it is for — and R&B of every type carries sure signifiers with it. These signifiers can minimize each methods: Typically R&B diehards see venturing past its borders as a betrayal, doubtless 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 informed Paste. “I am rejecting that as a result of I do not suppose it is honest for artists to really feel like they’ve to come back in a technique and keep that manner. You need to develop and evolve.”
That mission has led her to a contradictory place: Evolution is ahead growth, and Blue Island largely strikes alongside erstwhile musical milestones. She has stated 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 probably the most omnivorous Ravyn Lenae album, its ambitions are almost as retrograde as they’re impressed, and the report 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 informed Dazed that when “Love Me Not” reached an even bigger viewers, “I felt like there have been occasions when my identification was picked aside. My Blackness was questioned with reference to the kind of music I preferred to make.” Because of attempting to seize the reins of her profession and identification, she has maybe discovered herself justifying her existence to those that misunderstand her, listeners who doubtless solely had a passive relationship along 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 stated. “With every album I study extra about how I need to be obtained.”
Studying what sort of artistry you want to undertaking 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 rigorously curated pursuits. After all, it is potential for such an endeavor 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 fantastic that she does not need to be confined inside the R&B field, however she needn’t run from these ties both. Black artists usually get so self-conscious in regards to the notion of their Black musical expertise that they find yourself defining themselves in opposition to 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 tune particularly about desirous to explode the notion that Black artists needs to be compelled to be anybody factor. However it isn’t specific in its expression of that concept, as a substitute utilizing an evening out as a metaphor and merely reveling within the freedom of exploration, each lyrically and sonically. The monitor is probably 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 crammed with defiant strikes, it’s the first second she appears really free from the viewers’s judgment.
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