On the cover of her sophomore album, Ravyn Lenae dunks her reddened hair into her grandmother’s basement sink. The photo is sepia-stained, and the interior around her is crude and unpretentious. She rests one hand on the edge of a rusted basin and diverts her gaze from the camera. She isn’t staring at you—she’s staring through you.
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She’s in a moment of real-time liberation. “I feel like I was really getting an understanding of my identity,” she says of recording Bird’s Eye. “I was making bold choices to assert that—one of them being dying my hair red for the first time.” But she looks so sad. Her copper curls bleed into the rust-colored background. She’s in the chrysalis of her childhood home, getting ready to emerge with red wings and boundless conviction.
Bird’s Eye is all about that moment of transition. It doesn’t dwell in the bitter throes of past uncertainties nor spend its 35-minute run-time imagining a hazy and tentative future. It is certain of where it stands in the present.
“This might be the most present I’ve felt in an album process,” Lenae tells me over Zoom. She’s calling from New York’s Lower East Side. Her lips are glossed, and her hair is amber, pushed out of her face by a black tie-dyed bandana. She has an effortless and genuine sweetness, immediately genuine and open. “Thank you, love,” she says to me just before ending the call.
Lenae began recording and releasing music in 2015, at just 16 years old. The next year, she was signed to Atlantic and released her second EP, Midnight Moonlight, in early 2017, right after getting off the road from Noname’s Telefone tour. Her exceptional debut album was 2022’s Hypnos, a flighty R&B piece featuring Steve Lacy, Kaytranada, and Fousheé, among others.
With Bird’s Eye, Lenae wanted to do something different. “It’s not offensive to me,” she tells me of the “alternative R&B” label that her music has often been received. “I understand why people have to put names to things, just to understand certain things… but I think internally, for me, it’s important that I let go of those labels.” R&B is important to Lenae, make no mistake about it. She says, “It’s always natural and important for me to acknowledge my R&B and soulful roots.” But it isn’t all she does. Adding modifiers like “alternative” or “experimental” doesn’t necessarily ring any truer, because it’s not that she’s R&B with a caveat. She’s R&B and then some. Perhaps Hypnos was an alternative R&B record, but Bird’s Eye is something else.
Performing at the Grammy Museum’s Inaugural Grammy Hall Of Fame Gala and Concert in Los Angeles, May 21, 2024. (Credit: Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
Some of Bird’s Eye’s most exciting moments are born out of the and then some, born out of the transition that Lenae is consciously making from what she expects herself to sound like into what she wants to sound like. Single “Love Me Not” is an indie rock banger with a soulful bent—Lenae’s vocals are sharper and edgier than they’ve ever been. The song folds into the album’s dreamscape, but it also punches out.
“‘Love Me Not’ was probably the hardest to get right,” she tells me. “I just really had to push myself out of needing to sound neat or pretty or perfect. And that is something I’m working to learn because music is just way more fun when you can explore these different colors. And I want to be able to access the rainbow.”
If “Love Me Not” is red and raging, a song like “1 of 1” is lime green and chromatic. It opens with a digital-sounding electronic theme, something of a cross between a SOPHIE B-side and a pinging Azealia Banks beat. She made the beat along with DJ Dahi—producer extraordinaire of Kendrick Lamar “Money Trees” and Drake “Worst Behavior” fame, among many others—and longtime friend and collaborator Steve Lacy. “I thought it would just be fun to have something on there that felt a little rambunctious,” she says. “A little head-knocking loud against softer vocals.”
The record does have some more standard neo-soul numbers—for instance “Love Me Not”’s release partner “Love Is Blind” and the breathless, stream-of-consciousness “Bad Idea.” She brings in Childish Gambino to tell the story of her fraught relationship with her father on slow jam “One Wish.” “Something really memorable and special about working with Donald [Glover] is that he really cares about making sure he gets the story right,” she says.
The record’s thematic centerpiece, Lenae tells me, is the penultimate “Pilot”: a gorgeous song with a hypnotizing swirl of sick-sweet vocals that belie the anxieties she grapples with through its lyrics. “‘Cause I don’t know where to start / Can’t say where I begin,” she sings. “Just know I’m 24 / Small to the world I’m in.” She embraces the radical present tense.
“I just love that image of feeling small, but in a way that makes you hopeful and excited for the world around you,” she tells me. “Maybe not knowing exactly where you’re going to land, or where the destination is, but feeling so good about the path you’re on. I think that is the thesis of the album for me.”
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