Ravyn Lenae calls home on “Never Let Me Go,” a bluesy highlight from her third album, Blue Island. The recording that spans the final minute of the song finds the singer in conversation with her grandfather, whom she affectionately greets as Papo. “I was calling Grandma ‘cause I needed help with a line in this song,” she tells him. All the warmth and familiarity that comes with returning to a home base is evident in Lenae’s voice as she speaks, each word bending around her Chicago accent. Papo inquires about her album process, which she assures him is coming together smoothly. “Are they selling OK?” he asks about her first two LPs, 2022’s Hypnos and 2024’s Bird’s Eye. “Yeah,” Lenae says. “Well, this last one doin’ really well.”
Lanae returned to her grandparents’ South Side home during the making of Bird’s Eye so she could “retrace my steps and relive the moments that make me, me,” as she said that year The record took her a long way from home, setting her on tour and festival stages propelled by the success of her slow-burning hit “Love Me Not.” The single peaked at Number Five on the Billboard Hot 100 more than a year after its release. An album steeped so deeply in her roots was the perfect introduction for her new audience. But now, with Blue Island, Lenae turns her perception outwards. The record is built around the clarity and compassion that can only come from an insatiable appetite for exploration.
“Never Let Me Go” builds around an interpolation of Charles Jackson’s soul single “Love of You” from his 1978 album Passionate Breezes. There are some uploads of the recording scattered across YouTube, but it’s otherwise inaccessible on streaming. Lenae uses it as a springboard for an awestruck ode to living and loving in the moment. Love is her greatest preoccupation across Blue Island. Love that makes time stop, then move too quickly. Love that lingers in skin, bones, and memories. Love that, as she sings on the album’s lead single and opening track, “is like a landslide.” The 27-year-old gives herself over to it entirely. “Know I might be more than you can handle,” Lenae sings. “When it all comes down, only one way to find out.”
Lenae welcomes an adventurous curiosity without being too hard on herself when her heart ends up on the chopping block. “I’m a hazard to myself/Walking on a tightrope lately,” she sings on “In & Out,” a bass-heavy, delectably catchy indie-pop tune. “Buckling my belt/Little false sense of my safety.” She seeks relief from the swelling tension of “Barriers” and “Saturday Night,” ultimately choosing her head over her heart. Her breaking points come with an edge of humor, like when she stops holding her tongue on “Bobby” and admits, “Your stories can be boring/I can’t fake another climax with you.”
Blue Island maintains its sense of clarity even when it’s tangling itself up in second-guesses and contradictions. “Whatever we said back then doesn’t hurt me/In the unusual I am finding peace/I’m letting go now, let go of me,” Lenae sings on “Wish You Well.” The percussive track walks back the pleas she spills a few songs earlier on “Never Let Me Go” and “Familiar Dreams,” about reconnecting with an old flame after eight years (and two weeks, to be exact). “Where does all the love even go? Did it slip through the hands of time? Are the feelings written in stone?” she asks. “Would it hit me the same way twice? Or maybe you should go your way and I’ll go mine.”
In the months leading up to Blue Island, even dating back to when “Love Me Not” first broke through, Lenae has adamantly pushed back against restrictive expectations from people who see her as nothing more than an R&B artist. “It’s really a disservice to Black women to think that we have to be one way or the other,” she told Rolling Stone. While her other records have similarly spread across genre lines, Blue Island is especially ambitious and expansive. “Potential” builds around sweet melodies that collapse into an industrial clatter of electronic distortion. It’s followed immediately by “Sew Me Back Together,” which blends funk and blues with the best of Nineties R&B. Lenae partners with featured guest Doechii on the Fugees-esque “Babygirl” and Dominic Fike on “Reputation,” a tranquil acoustic duet.
Lenae didn’t need to prove a point with Blue Island, and her range shouldn’t have ever been up for debate in the first place. The most consistent signature across her growing catalogue is her self-assurance as a performer. She might not know everything when it comes to love, but she does know what she’s capable of when she steps into the studio. Still, she’s committed to working out how wide of a net she can cast. The intention isn’t to shut down any asinine debates about whatever kind of music she “should” or “shouldn’t” be making, or whatever perceived betrayal of Black genres has been projected onto her, but to expand the musical language she uses to translate her experiences to song.
At times, Blue Island feels somewhat like a sister album to Olivia Dean’s breakthrough album, The Art of Loving. They share an intense and almost anthropological interest in interrogating how we treat ourselves and each other in love with nuance and empathy. The thread is strongest between Dean’s “A Couple Minutes,” which contains the album’s fundamental argument that “love’s never wasted when it’s shared,” and Lenae’s “Find It One Day.” “If you’re thinking it wasn’t real/Soon it’s all gonna be revealed/And you know that I love you still,” Lenae sings.
There are pieces of the past scattered across all 14 songs on Blue Island. The record also points clearly towards the future, one in which Lenae is an obvious leader in pop, R&B, alt-anything, and whatever else she decides to lay claim to. She sounds at home across them all.
