You’ll be able to’t consider it’s a tune from this period. The second Ravyn Lenae’s voice floats over these handclaps and gritty guitar licks, “Love Me Not” feels prefer it’s been beamed in from 1997.
Possibly 2003. That candy spot the place R&B nonetheless had grit below its fingernails and pop hadn’t been sterilised by algorithm.
But right here it sits, considered one of 2025’s greatest hits, proving that generally essentially the most radical factor you are able to do is belief in timelessness.
Launched because the lead single from her second album Hen’s Eye, the observe’s been tagged as R&B, soul-rock, indie rock, retro pop. These labels barely scratch the floor.
Co-produced by Balmoris, DJ Dahi, Ritz Reynolds, Spencer Stewart, and Ely Rise (constructed on a decade-old sketch with Anderson .Paak), that is much less throwback, extra time journey.
Every period lends its finest with out drowning out the others.
The Tune: The place Many years Collide
The manufacturing doesn’t simply reference the previous. It phases a correct dialog between many years.
There’s a Mark Ronson-esque brilliance right here, taking the timeless groove of soul and the crispness of indie-rock and repolishing it with out dropping what made it work within the first place.
In line with Official Charts, the observe blends handclaps, gritty guitars, and a timeless groove.
The percussion snaps with Motown confidence. The guitars chime with that exact jangle that outlined mid-2000s indie. Nothing sounds spinoff.
Lenae and her workforce have turned influences into one thing that stands completely by itself.
After which there’s Lenae’s voice. She delivers “Oh no I don’t want you however I miss you come right here” with this breathy wistfulness that dissolves into sudden command.
It’s the stress that makes the tune addictive. That fixed back-and-forth between vulnerability and self-possession.
The observe explores needing a companion whereas wanting independence, and Lenae doesn’t resolve that contradiction. She makes you need to stay inside it.
The tune offers off this sense of lacking somebody or one thing. That specific ache that sits in your chest if you’re caught between wanting and realizing higher.
It sounds just like the golden age of 2010s pop: attractive and sophisticated, unafraid to sit down with discomfort whereas delivering hooks that burrow into your mind for days.
The Journey to Virality
The tune’s path to success has been something however standard. After dropping in Might 2024, it picked up steam on TikTok in October because of a mashup with Solange’s “Dropping You”.
Then it simply took on a lifetime of its personal. The viral success from that TikTok mashup earned Lenae her first top-25 Billboard entry, and the momentum hasn’t stopped.
What’s exceptional is how natural all of it feels. As Selection experiences, Lenae was celebrating Christmas together with her household when her digital workforce texted that it was time to lean into social media.
Inside weeks, the tune exploded from hundreds to a whole lot of hundreds of TikTok movies, soundtracking the whole lot from relationship drama to vogue matches. It grew to become unavoidable, however in the absolute best manner.
The Visuals
The self-directed music video dropped in August 2024, with Lenae taking full inventive management of her imaginative and prescient. Shot in formfitting styling that’s equal elements informal and punctiliously thought-about, the video captures somebody caught in that liminal area between needing somebody and needing to be alone.
The aesthetic leans into what Lenae calls her “fairy godmother, otherworldly creature” persona. Chatting with NYLON, she describes her type as an exaggeration of what already lives inside her: “this fairy godmother, otherworldly creature.
She desires to leap, she desires to bounce, she desires to shout.” That power interprets to display screen.
The video strikes by way of intimate areas that really feel each grounded and dreamlike, mirroring the tune’s refusal to settle into only one emotional register.
The Lyrics: A Fashionable Romance in Fragments
The genius of “Love Me Not” is the way it captures the messy actuality of recent relationships with out providing simple solutions.
The title performs on that childhood recreation of plucking flower petals (“he loves me, he loves me not”), however Lenae updates it for an period the place relationships exist in perpetual states of possibly.
She’s not asking whether or not somebody loves her. She’s wrestling with whether or not she even desires them to. As Lenae instructed Billboard, working with co-writer Sarah Aarons all through Hen’s Eye was transformative: “Having somebody by way of the complete factor who understands my perspective and the way in which I would like my tales to be instructed and written was so stunning.”
Traces oscillate between defiance and want, independence and wish. She even brings God into the dialog: “Lord, take it so distant / I pray that, God, we don’t break.”
It’s about being in love with uncertainty itself, concerning the unusual consolation of conserving somebody at arm’s size whereas secretly hoping they’ll come nearer. Each verse walks this tightrope, and Lenae by no means loses her stability.
The Verdict
“Love Me Not” is that uncommon factor: a tune that sounds immediately acquainted but wholly unique. Lenae herself says it’s about merging “issues that type of contradict one another; one thing that feels outdated and acquainted but additionally new and recent.” She’s nailed it.
This observe might soundtrack a summer time in any decade however feels urgently, particularly now.
For an artist who’s been constructing her craft for practically a decade, this second feels earned. The tune works as a result of it doesn’t strive too exhausting.
It’s a phenomenal, bittersweet meditation on the impossibility of recent love, wrapped in manufacturing so smooth you possibly can see your reflection in it.
It’s a buoyant R&B throwback that matches at pool events and seaside hangs, but it surely’s additionally the type of tune you play on repeat at 2am if you’re making an attempt to determine what went fallacious.
That contradiction is what makes “Love Me Not” not only a hit, however a normal: the type of tune that’ll be rediscovered and revered lengthy after the TikTok traits fade.
Ravyn Lenae has arrived. And she or he’s introduced the golden age together with her.
