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Ravyn Lenae, genius of melody: ‘What’s left out of love songs is the growth on the other side of a breakup’

Admired by SZA, Steve Lacy and more, the 25-year-old is writing one perfect pop song after another – while contending with an absent father, self-doubt and an industry that undermines Black women

Now 25, she is an astonishing writer of melody, perhaps the best of her generation, with luminously pretty lines lighting up every song of her new album Bird’s Eye, just as they did with her 2022 debut, Hypnos, and a string of EPs and mixtapes before that. Mapped on to Bird’s Eye’s winning melodies are lyrics about every type of love affair, situationship and human tangle imaginable, not just with family members but with soulmates, scumbags and everyone in between. At its core are slow jams (including the rapturous Skin Tight, again with Lacy), sung in a coy, breathy upper register, but she went way beyond the bedroom, zooming into the cosmos on the back of varied rhythm tracks.

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