Ravyn Lenae is a name that’s becoming synonymous with the future of R&B.
After gaining over 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify, being awarded Billboard’s R&B Rookie of the Year in 2025, and a string of standout collaborations with artists like Steve Lacy, Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis, Lenae has stepped into a new era.
Fans have declared her song “Love Me Not” as the jam of the summer, and now, she’s headlining the inaugural Paradice Festival alongside retro-soul group Thee Sacred Souls, the musica tropicale trio La Lom and more.
Paradice Festival
For Lenae, music is an expression of who she is, and the genres she’s held close since childhood have deeply shaped her musical identity.
“My music is directly rooted in a lot of genres, but one of the main ones being R&B and soul. ... I was raised on that,” she says. “That’s the anchor of me so I’m excited to play with other artists who’ve had the same story and connection to R&B, funk and soul music.”
Her career, which began at age 16, quickly took off with the release of Moon Shoes, an EP that helped her find her voice and a loyal following. Soon after, she signed with Atlantic Records, marking the start of her official industry journey. By 2022, she dropped Hypnos, an album that introduced her to the mainstream. But it was her 2024 follow-up, Bird’s Eye, that revealed a much deeper layer of her artistry.
“I think the most notable change between those albums is internal for me,” Lenae says. “When I wrote Hypnos, I had just moved to LA from Chicago. I had never moved away from home and there were lot of transitional things, a lot of emotional things were happening during that time. I was almost living in a cloud, so I associate that album with some of those feelings and struggles and having to navigate through them.”
But Bird’s Eye feels sonically different. It lulls the listener into adolescent spaces once forgotten with age. It’s reminiscent of the life-or-death feelings of a first kiss or first heartbreak—the things that shape a young mind. Lenae’s whispering falsetto is the lullaby we wish we had during those times. But we’re lucky to have it today.
A pivotal moment for Lenae during the creation of Bird’s Eye came when she returned to Chicago for the holidays. Walking through her childhood home, memories flooded in, like a symbolic homecoming of sorts.
“I went downstairs in the basement and just kind of had these reflections, these memories of who I was, of all of these rooms and the things I decided,” she says.
This reflection inspired the album cover. “I texted my manager immediately like, ‘I think the cover is literally me, but over the sink, my hair dyed.’ It’s so mundane but really struck me as a moment of me defining myself.”
As Lenae continues to evolve as an artist and as a person, it’s clear that she’s just getting started.
“In moments where I get to be in a room full of my peers and be acknowledged, it’s special to me. So I definitely don’t take it lightly and don’t take it for granted.”
PARADICE FESTIVAL September 27, 3 p.m., $63+. Downtown Las Vegas Events Center, paradicefest.com.
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