How Ravyn Lenae channeled 10 years of work into a timeless pop hit

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Last December, Ravyn Lenae stood in the street and pointed her phone at herself to film a TikTok set to her song “Love Me Not.”“Me after linking with him one last time cause I’m not bringing him into 2025,” she captioned the video — a cutesy kiss-off to a guy she’d clearly decided was holding her back from where she was meant to go.Nearly a year later, it appears the singer was right: In early April, “Love Me Not” — a swinging, lightly psychedelic soul number about a hot-and-cold lover — gave Lenae her first entry on Billboard’s Hot 100; a week later, she made her debut at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.Several months after that, she performed to an enthusiastic crowd at Lollapalooza just before “Love Me Not” peaked at No.

5 in mid-August.Now, with one of 2025’s biggest hits under her belt, Lenae, 26, is winding down her breakout year by opening for Sabrina Carpenter as Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet tour wraps up this week with six sold-out shows through Sunday at Crypto.com Arena.“A lot of this period has been me asking other artists, ‘Is this how it normally is?’” Lenae tells me on a recent evening.“How do you balance the social aspect and the online aspect and the touring with also staying highly creative?”Not to mention tending to a personal life.“What’s that?” she asks with a laugh.

“That’s literally nonexistent.”The runaway success of “Love Me Not,” which has been streamed more than 700 million times on Spotify, is no doubt what’s put the breathy-voiced Lenae before many listeners for the first time.(A remix featuring Rex Orange County has another 164 million Spotify streams.)At one point as the song was blowing up, she responded to a fan on TikTok who’d been surprised to learn that Lenae is Black — “Y’all didn’t read the name Ravyn Lenae and think, ‘Oh, that’s a Black girl?’” th...