You’ll be able to’t consider it’s a music from this period. The second Ravyn Lenae’s voice floats over these handclaps and gritty guitar licks, “Love Me Not” feels prefer it’s been beamed in from 1997.
Perhaps 2003. That candy spot the place R&B nonetheless had grit beneath its fingernails and pop hadn’t been sterilised by algorithm.
But right here it sits, one in every of 2025’s largest hits, proving that generally essentially the most radical factor you are able to do is belief in timelessness.
Launched because the lead single from her second album Fowl’s Eye, the monitor’s been tagged as R&B, soul-rock, indie rock, retro pop. These labels barely scratch the floor.
Co-produced by Balmoris, DJ Dahi, Ritz Reynolds, Spencer Stewart, and Ely Rise (constructed on a decade-old sketch with Anderson .Paak), that is much less throwback, extra time journey.
Every period lends its finest with out drowning out the others.
The Track: The place Many years Collide
The manufacturing doesn’t simply reference the previous. It levels a correct dialog between many years.
There’s a Mark Ronson-esque brilliance right here, taking the timeless groove of soul and the crispness of indie-rock and repolishing it with out dropping what made it work within the first place.
Based on Official Charts, the monitor blends handclaps, gritty guitars, and a timeless groove.
The percussion snaps with Motown confidence. The guitars chime with that individual jangle that outlined mid-2000s indie. Nothing sounds spinoff.
Lenae and her group have turned influences into one thing that stands totally by itself.
After which there’s Lenae’s voice. She delivers “Oh no I don’t want you however I miss you come right here” with this breathy wistfulness that dissolves into sudden command.
It’s the strain that makes the music addictive. That fixed back-and-forth between vulnerability and self-possession.
The monitor explores needing a associate whereas wanting independence, and Lenae doesn’t resolve that contradiction. She makes you wish to dwell inside it.
The music offers off this sense of lacking somebody or one thing. That exact ache that sits in your chest whenever you’re caught between wanting and figuring out higher.
It sounds just like the golden age of 2010s pop: attractive and sophisticated, unafraid to sit down with discomfort whereas delivering hooks that burrow into your mind for days.
The Journey to Virality
The music’s path to success has been something however standard. After dropping in Could 2024, it picked up steam on TikTok in October because of a mashup with Solange’s “Shedding You”.
Then it simply took on a lifetime of its personal. The viral success from that TikTok mashup earned Lenae her first top-25 Billboard entry, and the momentum hasn’t stopped.
What’s outstanding is how natural all of it feels. As Selection studies, Lenae was celebrating Christmas together with her household when her digital group texted that it was time to lean into social media.
Inside weeks, the music exploded from hundreds to lots of of hundreds of TikTok movies, soundtracking all the things from relationship drama to style matches. It turned unavoidable, however in the absolute best approach.
The Visuals
The self-directed music video dropped in August 2024, with Lenae taking full inventive management of her imaginative and prescient. Shot in formfitting styling that’s equal components informal and punctiliously thought-about, the video captures somebody caught in that liminal area between needing somebody and needing to be alone.
The aesthetic leans into what Lenae calls her “fairy godmother, otherworldly creature” persona. Chatting with NYLON, she describes her fashion as an exaggeration of what already lives inside her: “this fairy godmother, otherworldly creature.
She desires to leap, she desires to bounce, she desires to shout.” That power interprets to display.
The video strikes by way of intimate areas that really feel each grounded and dreamlike, mirroring the music’s refusal to settle into only one emotional register.
The Lyrics: A Trendy Romance in Fragments
The genius of “Love Me Not” is the way it captures the messy actuality of contemporary relationships with out providing straightforward solutions.
The title performs on that childhood sport of plucking flower petals (“he loves me, he loves me not”), however Lenae updates it for an period the place relationships exist in perpetual states of possibly.
She’s not asking whether or not somebody loves her. She’s wrestling with whether or not she even desires them to. As Lenae informed Billboard, working with co-writer Sarah Aarons all through Fowl’s Eye was transformative: “Having somebody by way of the whole factor who understands my perspective and the best way I would like my tales to be informed and written was so lovely.”
Traces oscillate between defiance and want, independence and wish. She even brings God into the dialog: “Lord, take it so far-off / I pray that, God, we don’t break.”
It’s about being in love with uncertainty itself, concerning the unusual consolation of preserving somebody at arm’s size whereas secretly hoping they’ll come nearer. Each verse walks this tightrope, and Lenae by no means loses her stability.
The Verdict
“Love Me Not” is that uncommon factor: a music that sounds immediately acquainted but wholly authentic. Lenae herself says it’s about merging “issues that sort of contradict one another; one thing that feels previous and acquainted but in addition new and recent.” She’s nailed it.
This monitor might soundtrack a summer time in any decade however feels urgently, particularly now.
For an artist who’s been constructing her craft for almost a decade, this second feels earned. The music works as a result of it doesn’t strive too arduous.
It’s a ravishing, bittersweet meditation on the impossibility of contemporary love, wrapped in manufacturing so glossy you possibly can see your reflection in it.
It’s a buoyant R&B throwback that matches at pool events and seashore hangs, nevertheless it’s additionally the sort of music you play on repeat at 2am whenever you’re making an attempt to determine what went unsuitable.
That contradiction is what makes “Love Me Not” not only a hit, however a typical: the sort of music that’ll be rediscovered and revered lengthy after the TikTok traits fade.
Ravyn Lenae has arrived. And he or she’s introduced the golden age together with her.
