{"id":646710,"date":"2026-08-20T05:23:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/646710\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T05:23:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:23:12","slug":"on-her-new-album-blue-island-ravyn-lenae-proves-she-can-do-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/646710\/","title":{"rendered":"On Her New Album \u2018Blue Island,\u2019 Ravyn Lenae Proves She Can Do It All"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ravyn Lenae<\/a>\u2019s third album, Blue Island, starts with a bang. A series of bangs, actually, as if someone is knocking down a door before Lenae makes her thunderous entrance with the killer lead single \u201cHandle\u201d: a perfect slice of guitar-led pop-rock that features an earworm of a chorus, boisterously proclaiming that, well, maybe she isn\u2019t for everyone. \u201cOh, my love, my love is like a landslide,\u201d she sings in a gorgeous, spiraling melody over bouncy \u201980s drums and record scratches. \u201cKnow I might be more than you could handle \/ When it all comes down, only one way to find out\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

For a long time, Lenae may indeed have felt she was more than mainstream audiences could handle. Hailing from the Chicago suburbs, she\u2019s been releasing music for over a decade, beginning with underground R&B EPs and eventually leading to her first full-length album, 2022\u2019s Steve Lacy and Kaytranada-assisted Hypnos, which landed on multiple year-end best-of lists, but didn\u2019t quite get the traction she\u2019d hoped for. Then came her 2024 follow-up, Bird\u2019s Eye, which kicked off with the global smash hit (and TikTok-viral) single \u201cLove Me Not,\u201d and led to a stint supporting Sabrina Carpenter and a stratospheric rise to fame for Lenae.<\/p>\n

Instead of riding that wave to work with blue-chip pop producers, however, Lenae saw it as an opportunity to take stock. Heading back to her hometown of Blue Island, Illinois (hence the album\u2019s title), she regrouped with her longtime collaborator Dahi to make a record that reflects her personal growth during that whirlwind time, from coming to terms with the end of a long-term relationship to adjusting to the sudden rise of voices online telling her what she should do next and who she should be as an artist.<\/p>\n

On Blue Island, her response to all that chatter seems to be: I can be any kind of artist I want to be. There are fabulous pop bangers like the second single, \u201cSaturday Night,\u201d with its shimmering synths and pulsing drum machines, in which she sings of encountering an ex-lover at a party and refusing to give in to temptation. (\u201cSay you miss me on a Saturday night \/ But I\u2019m still leaving without you,\u201d she sings.) There are the angular, grungy electric guitars of \u201cHandle\u201d and the whirring, club-ready beats of album closer \u201cLet Us In\u201d; the stripped-back fingerpicked guitar of the indie-pop track \u201cReputation,\u201d featuring Dominic Fike, and the neo-funk-meets-hip-hop thrill of \u201cBabygirl,\u201d to which Doechii contributed a handful of superb rap verses. On the warm, nostalgic \u201cNever Let Me Go,\u201d she pays a beautifully executed tribute to classic Chicago soul and doo-wop, eventually letting the strings and Wurlitzers and handclaps give way to a genuinely moving recording of her chatting with her grandparents.<\/p>\n

Her impressive versatility and sense of curiosity do, however, make it rather hard to pin down what exactly makes a Ravyn Lenae song a great Ravyn Lenae song. What\u2019s her view? She reels off a brief list: big, universal pop chords, hard-hitting beats that are a little off-kilter, chanty or anthemic melodies. And it\u2019s really the latter that serve as a through line across the record\u2014a classically trained vocalist, Lenae has an ear for the kind of strange but sticky melodies that elevate a good pop song to a truly great one. Even if you took away the production bells and whistles, you get the sense that these songs would be hits in any decade or genre. According to Lenae, that\u2019s precisely the point. \u201cI\u2019m obsessed with how that happens with songs, and they live forever and ever and ever, or they feel uniquely universal,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the magic I\u2019m trying to find with every song.\u201d On Blue Island, she finds that magic over and over and over again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ravyn Lenae\u2019s third album, Blue Island, starts with a bang. A series of bangs, actually, as if someone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":646711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[264],"tags":[18,117,19,17,337,14896,806],"class_list":["post-646710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset","tag-web"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117126169090609604","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=646710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/646711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=646710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=646710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=646710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}