Ravyn Lenae on ‘Love Me Not,’ Sabrina Carpenter, New Music (Exclusive)

• Singer-songwriter Ravyn Lenae’s fan base is continuing to grow as her 2024 single “Love Me Not” has gained traction on TikTok in recent months
• The Chicago-born R&B star will make her debut at Coachella on Friday, April 11
• Ahead of her set and her opening stint on Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet tour later this year, Lenae caught up with PEOPLE about the “timelessness” of her latest hit

Ravyn Lenae is still sitting in the car outside of collaborator Dahi’s home, minutes after driving through some “thick L.A. traffic” just to get there.

At the moment, she’s in the “early stages” creating her next album and has been locked in for around two weeks, she tells PEOPLE over Zoom. But while she’s been on the search for that “next feeling” in her music, the 26-year-old rising R&B artist can’t help but smile over just how much her fans — both the day-ones and new ones — are now connecting with that last feeling.

At the top of 2025, several months after its release last spring, Lenae’s track “Love Me Not” — the lead single off her sophomore album, Bird’s Eye — found a new audience with the help of a TikTok mash-up and listeners who just couldn’t quite pinpoint which decade the song hails from. That alone, Lenae says, has been enough to keep her working on new material.

“That’s been super inspiring for me to wake up and feel encouraged that people are discovering my discography and discovering me as an artist,” she says.

For those not tapped in or just now catching “Love Me Not” on their for-you-pages, Lenae has been chasing that next feeling since she signed with Atlantic Records as a teen back in 2016. She found quite a few fans with her Steve Lacy-assisted Crush EP in 2018, earned some critical acclaim and added notoriety for her debut album Hypnos in 2022 and is now experiencing a different level of attention nearly a year after releasing Bird’s Eye — her August 2024 LP all about perspective, with a little help from some new collaborators including Ty Dolla $ign (“Dream Girl”) and Childish Gambino (“One Wish”).

While the album surely had its fans at the time, “Love Me Not” has only fueled the buzz around both Bird’s Eye and Lenae herself — who next month is scheduled for her debut performance at Coachella, ahead of an opening slot on Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet tour in the fall.

And if you ask Lenae, she knew she and Dahi had something special right when they landed on “Love Me Not.”

“It’s that feeling that you don’t get super often with songs. Like the same feeling I got when I heard ‘Hey Ya!’ for the first time, or those really special songs that can live forever,” Lenae says. “And I think the thing I’ve paid most attention to is people saying that, ‘Oh this song, I thought this song was a song from the ’50s.’ And then somebody else would say, ‘I thought it was from the ’70s.’ That to me is really interesting because that means that this song has qualities of our favorite periods … It has this timelessness about it that I think I’m really realizing now.”

Those who are taken back to the 2010s when they hear “Love Me Not” wouldn’t be too far off-base, either. As Lenae shares, Dahi — the Grammy winner behind hits including Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees” and Mac Miller’s “Self Care” — had actually worked on the song previously with Anderson .Paak over a decade before he and Lenae turned it into what it is today.

“There was a skeleton of the song there,” Lenae tells PEOPLE. “The production took on a different life, like it moved more into the alt-pop, indie world with the guitars, and we just really built on it.”

“But Anderson had the hook on there and the first verse. So there was definitely the melodic choices, they definitely inspired the rest of the song and the shape that it took from there,” she adds. “Anderson is just an icon and that’s somebody I’m heavily inspired by. So to be able to work with him on it was really special for me.”

Another name involved in the “Love Me Not” lore is Solange — whose 2012 Dev Hynes-produced hit “Losing You” was used for a mash-up with Lenae’s track by New York DJ thatsode. The audio, shared back in October, created a domino effect that prompted the song to go viral in the first place.

“I think early on for me seeing a Black woman in the music space, but also really pushing boundaries and not being scared of taking risks and merging things that people might not get the first time and maybe they’ll get it the third time. I think that’s what inspired me the most about her,” Lenae says of Solange, whom she shared a photo alongside last year.

“And then just the freeness that she exhibits through her music, through her visuals, through her shows is something that I cling to with her,” Lenae adds. “So she will always be an inspiration for me and any woman in that space, especially being a Black woman and having that freeness, but also having that carefulness with the things that they put out into the world is something that I definitely pay attention to.”

After the Solange mash-up, and after her former tour mate SZA tweeted about Bird’s Eye being one of her favorite albums of 2024, Lenae says “Love Me Not” simply took on a “life of its own.”

Now, as Lenae admits with a laugh, she already has fans fighting over her.

“I think the funniest thing has been seeing the fans who’ve been like day-ones and been there from the beginning go back and forth with the new fans,” she says. “Like, ‘You all don’t deserve her.’ Or like, ‘This isn’t even her best song.’ I think it’s really funny just to see how they’re engaging with each other, but also I think [it’s important] just making sure that people understand me as an artist and not letting one song consume my entire discography.”

The proper next step, of course, is for new fans to “really dig into my older projects,” which Lenae herself calls “the most exciting thing about” artist discovery. “Following their journey and seeing how they got to this place and how even just sonically, the places that they went before they landed here is something I’m interested in,” she says. “So I hope people want to go on that journey with me.”

Adds Lenae: “I think an invested Ravyn fan will want to start from the beginning. It’s important to start there, just to really hear where I come from, where I started, who I started with. It’s such a big part of my story and how that’s taken shape over the years. So those are the type of fans that I want to keep and nurture and really grow with.”

Lenae’s forthcoming stint on Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour — which will also feature openers Olivia Dean and Amber Mark — will also likely secure her some more of those invested fans. And, as she tells PEOPLE, it all started with a message from Carpenter herself.

“It’s so funny because she DM-ed me maybe like a month ago and was just like, ‘I’m such a huge fan.’ And like, that gagged me obviously,” Lenae says. “And I had heard through the grapevine that she was going back out on tour, and so I hit my manager and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should ask and see if they found anybody yet or what’s going on.’”

“Before we could even do that, they had already hit us about it,” she adds. “So that just felt very fateful for me, and I’m so excited to meet her, to see her show and to just meet her fans.”

Until then, Lenae is still adjusting to the viral success of “Love Me Not” and the schedule that comes with it. But as busy as things may get, she remains focused on doing what she does best — chasing that next feeling.

“My wheels have been turning so much, just around really great things. Like every day I feel like I wake up and there’s something new to talk about,” she says. “A new opportunity or, I don’t know, I just wake up really hopeful and excited about possibility. So that’s me right now.”