Before the rest of the world caught on, Ravyn Lenae was your favourite R&B singer’s favourite R&B singer. The Chicago native and member of Smino’s Zero Fatigue collective signed to Atlantic as a teenager in 2016 and toured with SZA and Noname in the years to follow, establishing herself as a bold and versatile voice with releases like 2018’s Crush EP and her 2022 full-length debut, Hypnos. But it was 2024’s Bird’s Eye that thrust her into the mainstream—specifically, the runaway success of her breakout single “Love Me Not”. With more eyes on her than ever before, the singer spent the next year redefining her own ambitions (when she wasn’t watching her streams skyrocket or opening for Sabrina Carpenter or Reneé Rapp). When you finally arrived at your destiny, what did you have to leave behind? Lenae’s third album, Blue Island, asks similar questions, exploring the spaces between what once was and what could be. Named for the part of Chicagoland where she grew up, the collection finds the singer in transition, simultaneously looking to the future and grasping at her roots. On “Familiar Dreams”, she sings to a lover turned stranger, wondering what happened to all those old feelings, while the soulful “Never Let Me Go” ends with a phone call to her grandparents, asking them to help her finish a line in the song. Time works in funny ways on “Reputation”, a Dominic Fike duet with moody acoustic guitar and lyrics about looping back to an old flame, and on “Handle”, where ’90s grunge meets New Wave meets Santigold. It’s the most sonically experimental album of Lenae’s career, relishing in the sweet spot between nostalgia and anticipation—in other words, the present.