Ravyn Lenae is ready to re-emerge.
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It’s been a little under three months since she shared her third studio album, Blue Island, with the world — and got swept up in a hurricane of discourse that seemingly left her on an island of her own.
“I can’t tell if that’s because there are just more eyes now, or if it’s also older listeners who are protective over me and my sound and my trajectory and the history we have together,” she tells Billboard of the particularly loud discussion around her latest album and its performance. “There were a few things creating this feeling of discourse that’s never happened with any of my rollouts before.”
Long heralded as “your favorite artist’s favorite artist,” Lenae finally scored her mainstream breakthrough in 2025 with the jaunty, Anderson .Paak co-written “Love Me Not.” The guitar-backed single rode TikTok virality to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, over one billion official on-demand U.S. streams, and helped its parent album, Bird’s Eye, become Lenae’s very first Billboard 200 entry (No. 139).
Along with that oh-so-sweet commercial success came rounds of discourse that callously dissected her racial identity, her relationship with her Blackness, and the winding history of genre in the context of American music. Some of those conversations were led by her, and others chugged along as if she were a mere concept and not a real human being — but all of them seemed to abandon the music at the center of it all.
So, she took a pause. Our chat is one of her first “in a while,” she says, because “she started to feel weird about sharing herself.”
“I care if people understand me,” she continues, her voice growing more passionate. “I care if people know where I’m coming from, my point of view, and what I’m trying to say. That doesn’t mesh well with high visibility. The deeper I get into my career, I have to learn to let that go a little bit, and let people walk away with an impression of me that I can’t control. It’s been sobering to learn the value of my own opinion, and what I know is true of myself and my intentions and my music.”
As larger, necessary conversations regarding race, genre, music and industry categorization subsumed her Blue Island press run, the album’s softer, relatively disappointing commercial returns further darkened the energy around the release. Blue Island arrived on Aug. 7 via Atlantic Records, and despite strong reviews, the album failed to enter a single Billboard chart, while none of the album’s four pre-release singles entered the Hot 100. That’s a surprising return for someone who had a massive hit record the year prior, and who spent the following months playing festival stages around the world, headlining her own tours and opening for arena-headlining runs by Sabrina Carpenter and Reneé Rapp.
“This is the most expectations I’ve ever had around a release,” she agrees. “Last year, I saw what’s really possible for my music, especially numbers-wise and all the metrics. It becomes a real thing I place value in after I’ve seen it do well — so it’s hard not to start attaching that to every bit of the process, and have expectations around the [next] release, and hoping that I soaked up enough fans from the last thing to be attentive for the [new thing].”
And over the past few weeks, Lenae has allowed herself to revisit Blue Island and “be proud of the work she did.” When we spoke, she’d last given the album a complete listen on the plane ride back to Los Angeles from New York. The Doechii-assisted “Babygirl” still rings true as a “course-correcting inner monologue,” while standouts like “Potential” still carry layers of discomfort.
“That’s a story I’ve been ruminating over for years, so it’s so bittersweet that it almost feels like picking a scab when I revisit it,” she muses, later adding that the Chicago footwork patterns that close the song are musical elements she’d like to continue exploring. “It touches on my teen years, which was a really tender, impressionable time for me. Sometimes I feel stuck there when I keep writing songs about that time and about that person. But that’s probably the proudest I’ve been of a song.”
Lenae reunited with Dahi, who co-produced each of the album’s 14 tracks, for Blue Island, also recruiting newer collaborators Tayla Parx, Spencer Stewart of The Band Camino, Mikky Ekko, Alissia, Ian Kirkpatrick, Dominic Fike, Justin Tranter and Jim-E Stack. In life’s quieter moments, Lenae has always gravitated towards Ethiopian jazz and Bollywood music — two styles she explicitly drew from while crafting Blue Island. She drew on the emotional complexity of Ethiopian jazz chords to color her own approach to the heart’s gray areas, and she heard bits of herself in the pingy, high-pitched female vocals across Bollywood soundtracks.
“I wanted to combine that [sound] with certain guitar riffs,” she says. “‘Pal Pal Dil Ke Paas’ by Kishore Kumar was the start of it all; those chords feel so melancholy, but the drum pocket is really chipper and uplifting, almost like a marching band.”
As her and Dahi’s mutual trust deepened, the dynamic duo spent the Blue Island sessions “pushing what we think is ‘cool’ or ‘acceptable,’ especially on a Black girl.” Take “Saturday Night,” which they initially wrote over guitar, with Lenae singing the hook in a Western-y cadence. By the time they added the drums and more electronic elements in the post-chorus, Lenae questioned the country feel of her vocal tone in the hook — but that textural contrast is what makes “Saturday Night” so familiar yet distinct.
“Because of the way my voice sounds, I sometimes shy away from more abrasive, ugly sounds, whether that’s in the production or with how I use my voice,” she says. “A song like ‘Handle’ allows my voice to be used as an instrument in almost yelling, non-singing, chanty way, and ‘Love Me Not’ pushed me there. Even when I’m singing a line in a more traditional sense, I’m stacking tons of kind of out-of-key vocal takes underneath to give it texture. I’m such an R&B student of Janet Jackson and Brandy, so stacking is an art form. It was interesting to unlearn that on some of these songs and be okay with a loose approach. I learned how to follow what the song is asking for versus what I would naturally do.”
Lenae’s catalog is steeped in soul and rooted in the R&B tradition, and she’s always pulled from a vast range of influences — even more so on Blue Island. Named for the town in which she was born (it’s more of a place people pass through and truly live in), the album explores the feeling of transition, expansion and all-around limitlessness that Bird’s Eye thrust her into. New wave and arena rock elements live alongside traditional R&B, bedroom pop and electronic moments, and Lenae, rightfully, wants the full expanse of the album’s sonic identity to be accurately represented when it’s discussed.
In an era dominated by clipping culture, surface-level reading, a general media literacy crisis and folks who listen to react, instead of listening to understand, some corners of social media felt that Lenae was either abandoning her R&B roots or searching for validation from a crowd that would never give it to her. But that kind of confusion was almost inevitable, because genre means everything for artists, especially Black ones, from how they’re promoted to the size of their budgets — yet it doesn’t mean nearly as much for audiences in the streaming age.
“[Genre] was a big topic, and one sole thing never feels right,” she reflects, choosing her words carefully. “When people are like, ‘Genre doesn’t matter,’ that’s a lie. It’s a cop out. Genre will always matter for Black people. I was told that if you [label a release a] certain way on DSPs, that has to be reflected in how you submit for Grammys. These structures aren’t built for artists like me. When I see my album under R&B, it doesn’t feel wrong, but we’re also missing the whole pop pocket. I don’t know what the right thing is — but when I submit for the Grammys, it will be in progressive R&B because that’s what encompasses the album.”
Lenae was meant to support Blue Island on tour this fall. Just weeks after the album debuted, she took to Instagram to announce the shows would be postponed, with refunds available for those who had already purchased tickets. After the exhausting discourse and soft opening-week numbers, that certainly wasn’t the ideal conclusion to the first few weeks of the Blue Island rollout.
“I’ve never had to cancel a show in my life,” she says softly. “This was a really hard decision for reasons I don’t want to talk about publicly. I need my fans to know that I didn’t make the decision lightly. I cried about it a lot. It’s not fun, and very costly, having to do that.”
If a song were to blow up from Blue Island, it would probably happen on tour. At her Governor’s Ball 2026 set, “Saturday Night” truly came alive thanks to choreography and movement direction courtesy of Akira Uchida, who’s previously worked with artists ranging from Florence + the Machine to Saint Levant. Lenae may not bust out an eight-count in sky-high stilettos and leotards, but she’ll blend Diana Ross-esque eyes and body shapes with creepy, witchy contortions.
“The natural thing for us to do, especially as women, is to find the most appealing, sexy body positions,” she muses. “That’s great, but for this music and where I am right now, I’m more interested in combating that and turning it on its head.” (Fans will still get a chance to see Lenae bring Blue Island to the stage when she opens for the European leg of Sombr’s You Are the Reason Tour next spring.)
For now, Ravyn Lenae is heading back to Panama, where her family’s from, to spend a few weeks with her grandparents before strapping up her boots to give the music of Blue Island the moment it deserves. As she continues to recalibrate herself ahead of next spring’s shows, Lenae is also finding community with other Black women navigating the music industry. She tells me that Yseult, an acclaimed, fast-rising singer-songwriter from France, started a group chat on Instagram that’s grown into over 40 young Black women in music checking in with one another. Most of the time, they barely talk about music; some chat about how they’re feeling on a given day, and others trade advice on balancing touring and motherhood.
“There’s sisterhood happening in music, and I never thought that would happen,” Lenae gushes. “I feel like there’s always been an isolated approach, especially with Black women in music. It’s been set up that way for us. Once we realize that we can reach over and touch each other — and that our experiences aren’t really that unique — it makes us all feel seen. We’ve been doing meetups; there are weekly events, so we jump in when we can. Knowing that there’s a support system outside of my immediate circle has been cool. I think all of us needed it.”
