Final December, Ravyn Lenae stood on the street and pointed her telephone at herself to movie a TikTok set to her tune “Love Me Not.”
“Me after linking with him one final time trigger I’m not bringing him into 2025,” she captioned the video — a cutesy kiss-off to a man she’d clearly determined was holding her again from the place she was meant to go.
Practically a 12 months later, it seems the singer was proper: In early April, “Love Me Not” — a swinging, evenly psychedelic soul quantity a couple of hot-and-cold lover — gave Lenae her first entry on Billboard’s Scorching 100; per week later, she made her debut on the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Competition. A number of months after that, she carried out to an enthusiastic crowd at Lollapalooza simply earlier than “Love Me Not” peaked at No. 5 in mid-August.
Now, with one in all 2025’s largest hits beneath her belt, Lenae, 26, is winding down her breakout 12 months by opening for Sabrina Carpenter as Carpenter’s Quick n’ Candy tour wraps up this week with six sold-out exhibits by way of Sunday at Crypto.com Area.
“Lots of this era has been me asking different artists, ‘Is that this the way it usually is?’” Lenae tells me on a latest night. “How do you steadiness the social side and the net side and the touring with additionally staying extremely inventive?”
To not point out tending to a private life.
“What’s that?” she asks with fun. “That’s actually nonexistent.”
The runaway success of “Love Me Not,” which has been streamed greater than 700 million occasions on Spotify, is little question what’s put the breathy-voiced Lenae earlier than many listeners for the primary time. (A remix that includes Rex Orange County has one other 164 million Spotify streams.)
At one level because the tune was blowing up, she responded to a fan on TikTok who’d been shocked to study that Lenae is Black — “Y’all didn’t learn the identify Ravyn Lenae and assume, ‘Oh, that’s a Black lady?’” the singer asks within the clip — then went forward and clarified that additionally she’s not British, as some evidently had assumed.
But “Love Me Not” really comes a decade right into a profession that started whereas Lenae was nonetheless in highschool. She signed to Atlantic Data at age 16 and shortly was touring and dealing within the studio with the likes of SZA and Steve Lacy; “Hypnos,” her debut LP, got here out in 2022 and made Pitchfork’s intently watched listing of the 12 months’s finest albums.
“I’m fairly immodest about the truth that I’ve cherished Ravyn for so long as I’ve,” says the singer and actor Reneé Rapp, who like Carpenter took Lenae out on the highway this 12 months as a gap act. Rapp found one in all Lenae’s early EPs when she herself was in highschool and has been a fan ever since. “I’m like, ‘You bitches are new, and don’t get me flawed — I’m so completely happy you’re right here. However let’s get it proper: I used to be boots on the bottom first.’”
To Rapp’s ears, Lenae’s ethereal soprano “has this stunning ping on the prime that I’ve solely ever heard in Minnie Riperton,” she says. “She’s similar to slightly fairy. She floats round, and her voice does the identical factor.”
“Love Me Not,” which remains to be hanging out within the higher reaches of the Scorching 100, is from Lenae’s sophomore album, “Hen’s Eye,” which got here out in August 2024. She recorded the tune with the producer Dahi, who’s recognized for his work with Kendrick Lamar and Vince Staples; Dahi began the monitor years in the past with Anderson .Paak then put it in a drawer earlier than he’d completed it.
“On the time, I used to be actually into MGMT,” Dahi says, referring to the choice rock duo whose dreamy-jangly guitar sound echoes all through “Love Me Not.” With Lenae, he pushed the tune towards traditional R&B — “one thing that will be performed on ‘Glad Days’ or some s—,” he says — however retained a spacey vibe that retains it from feeling rooted in any particular period or style.
Lenae says her purpose was to create one thing “soulful and Black however that transcends time and race”; the consequence will be heard in a lineage of tolerating hard-to-classify hits like Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” and Gnarls Barkley’s “Loopy” that allure listeners throughout demographic traces.
“In the event you don’t like ‘Loopy,’ there’s one thing flawed with you,” Lenae says as a pedicurist exfoliates her toes in a West Hollywood lodge room. It’s the top of a protracted day that started with an early-morning flight from New York, the place Lenae carried out with Kali Uchis on “The Tonight Present” and at Madison Sq. Backyard. Now, after a photograph shoot, she’s turned into grey sweats to sneak in a second of self-care throughout our chat.
“With the heels I’m carrying on a regular basis, you’ll be able to see the corns,” she says, trying down to take a look at the pedicurist’s progress. “I ponder what Beyoncé’s toes seem like. ’Trigger if mine seem like this? She’s placing in work.”
Although “Love Me Not” was singled out by critics instantly, the tune actually took off late final 12 months after a DJ posted a viral TikTok that mashed it up with Solange’s “Shedding You” as a part of a collection exploring “euphoric” breakup songs. An admiring publish on X by SZA — “One in all my fav albums this 12 months,” she wrote of “Hen’s Eye” — helped deliver extra consideration to Lenae’s music.
Ravyn Lenae in West Hollywood.
(Ian Spanier / For The Occasions)
The singer grew up in Chicago, the place her mom’s dad and mom landed within the late ’70s as immigrants from Panama. That’s their home on town’s south facet within the music video for “Love Me Not,” which Lenae directed and which exhibits her and her youthful sister dancing simply outdoors the bed room the place Lenae slept as a child.
“I knew this tune can be lots of people’s introduction to me, so I needed them to right away leap into my world,” she says. “My grandparents are very shy individuals, and when my grandma noticed the video, she was like, ‘Oh, Ravyn, child …’”
Singing at expertise exhibits as a 12-year-old, Lenae needed to be a “a combination between Alicia Keys and Beyoncé,” as she places it; later, she discovered to carry out Christina Aguilera’s “Lovely” and Rihanna’s “Take a Bow.”
“I used to be like, ‘I’m-a win ’em over with this one,’” she says of the dramatic ballads. “I’m certain I sound loopy on video.”
Lenae, who went on to review on the Chicago Excessive College for the Arts, got here to know that the mushy lilt of her voice distinguished her from these powerhouses; she discovered inspiration in “the sensuality and the femininity” of music by Diana Ross, Patrice Rushen and Janet Jackson, whose “All for You” album — launched in 2001, when Lenae was 2 — would grow to be a touchstone.
“There’s quite a bit to win by not being the loudest within the room,” says Rapp.
Lenae moved to L.A. in 2020. Her first 12 months right here was tough, she says — she missed her mother and felt the burden of a checking account with $100 in it. “I keep in mind some crying within the bathe,” the singer says now.
Her 2022 tune “Pores and skin Tight,” a craving flirtation she wrote and recorded with Lacy, registered as a turning level; so did the success of Lacy’s quirky soul-rock hit “Unhealthy Behavior,” which topped the Scorching 100 on its approach to Grammy nominations for file and tune of the 12 months.
“That was a historic second for artists like us which were working at it for a very long time — Black artists who’ve at all times been slightly to the left of what was occurring,” Lenae says. “Steve going No. 1 confirmed there actually aren’t any guidelines and that there’s area for all of us.”
Past “Love Me Not,” highlights on “Hen’s Eye” embody an intimate acoustic quantity, “From Scratch,” that Lenae says she and Dahi modeled on Lauryn Hill and D’Angelo’s “Nothing Even Issues”; the plush and whispery “Dream Woman,” which options enter by Jackson’s longtime collaborators Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis; and “Unhealthy Concept,” a percussive electro-funk jam that interpolates Bow Wow and Ciara’s early-2000s “Like You.”
“All these Ciara hits, I had the choreo down,” Lenae says.
The album additionally incorporates the tender but mournful “One Want,” which Lenae wrote about her dad not being round as she was rising up.
“I by no means, ever thought I’d speak about that publicly, however I believe I used to be simply at some extent in my life the place it felt pure,” she says. “And me and him had simply began reconciling, so it was very prime of thoughts.” She invited her father to come back to L.A. to look within the tune’s video, which depicts a younger lady working after a automotive as a person angrily drives away; the day after the shoot, they went to Roscoe’s and had a protracted speak about her childhood.
“Yesterday was his birthday, and I forgot,” she tells me. “I felt horrible, however then I used to be like, Ought to I really feel horrible? I shuttle with it on a regular basis.”
Lenae is extraordinarily shut along with her mom, who’ll generally be part of her on the highway “simply to spend time with me or maintain my hand — to sleep in the identical lodge mattress,” she says. “That’s the particular person I do know I can hold relying on.”
After this week’s dates with Carpenter, Lenae will head east for a handful of exhibits on iHeartRadio’s Jingle Ball tour — another likelihood to construct upon “Love Me Not’s” High 40 breakthrough. Then she and Dahi plan to concentrate on ending her subsequent album.
Thus far, Lenae says, it’s shaping as much as be “slightly extra punchy and explosive” than “Hen’s Eye.” One of many new songs is about her mother; Lenae performed it for her when she was right here visiting not way back.
“I had the lyrics up, and as she was studying it, she appeared up at me and there was a tear in her eye,” she recollects. “Then we began bawling collectively. I believe that one may find yourself her favourite.”
