“This is not a critique more so a curiosity but why do we all think being alone is the biggest form of self discovery when we’re wired to couple/group up with each other and depend on connection in a lot of ways,” Ravyn Lenae posted on her second Instagram account, @blueisland333. She created it about a week after announcing her third album, Blue Island, and has since filled it with everything from off-the-cuff reflections (“one feeling i really wanna conquer is being nervous…”) to praises for her favorite things (“top 3 best pop albums ever it has everything u could ever want” reads the caption on a photo of Nelly Furtado’s Loose). It’s basically a spam account, and isn’t that different from Charli xcx’s @b.sides or Addison Rae’s @freedomandcontrol. Lenae uses hers as a candid, expansive self-portrait, spilling her guts and documenting herself with friends and family, alone at home, even at vocal lessons. I personally found the account when one of Lenae’s jokier posts went viral: “i wasn’t sure about my nails but now i like them bc they look like ibuprofen,” with a photo of her hand next to Advil Liquicaps—the color was dead on. Scroll down, and you’ll find a feed that moves freely between introspection, silliness, intimacy, and self-disclosure. Lenae’s third album, Blue Island, translates that multiplicity into music. Blue Island follows Lenae’s big break: “Love Me Not” became a runaway hit almost a year after it dropped, eventually reaching the top five of the Billboard Hot 100 and the top ten of the Billboard Global 200. That kind of delayed explosion would teach anyone something about themselves, bringing constant motion to Lenae’s career and placing her before audiences far larger than those she’d previously reached. That increased visibility also brought strangers questioning, challenging, and attempting to define Lenae’s Blackness, until she addressed the debate herself on Instagram: “If you really study Black aesthetic, you would know that I’m pulling directly from women who’ve come before me: the Chaka Kahns, the Minnie Rippertons, the Diana Rosses. That’s who I looked to. So to me, this shows me that you have a very limited view of what Black girls, Black women can be.” Lenae used that perspective to inform the makeup of Blue Island, an album that resists pigeonholing by wearing its influences—Tracy Chapman, Santigold, Res—on its sleeve. Rigidity and labels feel especially restrictive when applied to an artist like Lenae, whose catalog has always treated both identity and genre as fluid, often shapeshifting between classic R&B, synthwave dance pop, and self-baring folk. This malleable approach to genre is honed even further on Blue Island, weaving between indie-rock angst and 1980s power ballads, with pit stops in psychedelic funk and trappy electronic abstractions. As Lenae expands stylistically, she also looks further inward. Blue Island traces how romance, friendship, and family have each shaped the person Lenae has become. The most immediate relationships on the record are romantic, captured with an in-the-moment urgency. “In & Out” churns with anticipatory energy, capturing the buzzy, fleeting mix of excitement and dread that follows a breakup. “I’m a hazard to myself,” Lenae sings, choosing to lean into riskiness rather than run from it. Single “Saturday Night,” with its massive echoes and feel-it-in-your-chest beat, explores a situationship (“Wanna keep your love longer than another weekend”) and all of the inconvenient emotional weight that comes with it. “Barriers” and “Sew Me Back Together” approach physical connection from opposite emotional temperatures. The former is a Michael Jackson/Prince hybrid full of bombastic echoes and desperate yearning; the latter is lighter and airier, its circular melody recreating the ease of bodies falling into rhythm. Some of the most revealing moments come from songs that handle reconnection. Underneath the funky cha-cha of “Familiar Dreams” sits a whirlwind story of reconciliation. Lenae cycles through curiosity (“Where does all the love even go? / Did it slip through the hands of time?”), tension (“You’re almost a stranger to me / So why does it feel like how it used to be?”), and hesitation (“My memories are talkin’ / They’re telling me to reach for the keys / Start walkin’”). The syncopated hook heightens the flirtatious suspense, while each verse and pre-chorus ends in a sigh that could signal relief, frustration, or both. Later, on “Potential,” the reconnection is hypothetical, as Lenae looks back on a relationship and ruminates on what did happen versus what could have been. It starts plucky and gentle, her signature falsetto coming in like a whisper. But before long, it breaks into a trappy, FKA Twigs-y, Lorde’s Melodrama-style percussive breakdown that sends the track into freefall. Friendship provides a looser, more grounding form of connection, bringing out Lenae’s warmth and playfulness. Doechii joins Lenae on “Babygirl,” a fitting pair given their parallel ascents. The downtempo, 1990s-tinged R&B cut has a laid-back verse from Doechii and a flash of Thundercat-like bass. Their exchanges are so seamless that the song almost feels like a freestyle. “Breakin them walls / Babygirl why go through the window?” Lenae asks, using friendship as a reminder of the importance of being present—that you don’t have to force yourself to take the hardest route. But it’s family that reminds Lenae of what she’s made of. On @blueisland333, she posted a photo of a wall covered in framed family photos: “i <3 this wall in my house bc it reminds me of who i belong to !” It’s this same belonging that closes “Never Let Me Go,” which ends with a phone call between Lenae and her grandparents. “So you got another album coming out sometime soon?” they ask, in a roundabout self-referential moment. “How many albums have you put out so far? And they’re selling okay? We’re proud of you, we’re proud of you.” Their questions bring Lenae’s larger-than-life, rapidly skyrocketing career back down to earth, into the small-scale mundanities of it all. By the clashing, fuzzy rush of closer “Let Us In,” Lenae seems energized by all that she contains: romance, silliness, doubt, ambition, friendship, family. A tactile lack of inhibition courses through the track, gathering all the different versions of Lenae into one expansive whole. There’s no single answer to who she is, and on Blue Island, she finds clarity in the contradiction—finds meaning in the many selves drawn out by both connection and its absence. Every bond offers another angle from which to understand Ravyn Lenae; it’s through other people that she becomes most legible to herself. [Atlantic] Cassidy Sollazzo is a music and culture writer based in Brooklyn. Alongside Paste, her work has appeared in Dazed, PAPER, Air Mail, ANTICS, and others.