Ravyn Lenae – ‘Blue Island’ review: R&B’s wunderkind finds her new pop groove

In the lead up to ‘Blue Island’, Ravyn Lenae’s third studio album, the singer told The Fader she hoped to free herself of “preconceived notions about Blackness” and what’s expected of her as an R&B stalwart: “It’s fun to challenge the idea of what R&B is supposed to sound like, what pop is supposed to sound like… and really say ‘fuck all of that’ and do my own thing.” Lenae took a pop-tinged R&B approach on 2022’s ‘Hypnos’ and 2024’s ‘Bird’s Eye’, but on album three ‘Blue Island’, that tinge lends way to a pop tidal wave with dashes of ’00s indie rock and ’80s new wave and electro-funk. READ MORE: Ravyn Lenae: “I now know what’s possible – but that just makes me hungrier” Lenae fuses a retro flair with modern sensibilities on single ‘Handle’, which serves as the album’s diffident opener, but the record only gets more interesting from here. Chameleonic tracks that transform halfway through – the snappy synthpop experiment ‘Saturday Night’, ballad hybrid ‘Find It One Day’, chaotic closer ‘Let Us In’, the sci-fi-esque ‘Wish You Well’ – are the album’s strongest points: catchy and toeing the line between familiar melodies and unexpected twists, traversing everything from al...