Ravyn Lenae: "I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get to Ireland, but I’m so excited about playing Electric Picnic"

I can’t believe it’s taken this long to get to Ireland, but I’m so excited about playing Electric Picnic. All the love Ireland has shown me, and with it being one of the first places to embrace ‘Love Me Not’ – that means a lot to me. . So I’m excited to actually see the faces who pushed this song. It’ll be a full-circle moment, very meaningful and special.

I’m really excited to get it out into the world. And honestly, the more I sat with it, the more I understood for myself what it means. It feels like a really special time. A lot of the album was made while I was experiencing the biggest high of my career so far. And there’s a lot of joy that comes with that, a lot of validation, but also a lot of change and restlessness. It’s like walking into the unknown.

I sat in a very particular place in the industry for a while, and then all of a sudden I’m exposed in a new way. Through a lot of it, I felt like my identity and my Blackness were questioned. People were confused about Black girls wanting to be in pop and wanting to experiment. People hearing ‘Love Me Not’ for the first time and thinking I was white – that opened the can of identity and what it means; and more specifically what it means to be Black in music.

I felt a need to reconcile that for myself. I had to really try to understand: what is it that I want to do – and what is it that I want to say – in my career. So, this album is me facing that and being okay with the restlessness and the unease it involves, while also riding this incredible wave.

Black artists have walked that path for years, trying to break down those barriers that still exist in music and in culture.

This album was a good moment for me to start standing by exactly what I feel, and believing in my vision, regardless of how this song, or that song, is going to be playlisted.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the politics of it. That’s especially true when you’re an artist who covers a lot of ground. At times that can feel like a curse, but you really have to embrace it as a gift. Once you switch your perspective on that, you feel empowered. Artists like me, Fousheé, Steve Lacy, Rachel Chinouriri – artists who are really doing their thing – it’s just inspiring. So hopefully there are artists, younger than us, right now seeing that, and it’s inspiring them to just do what the fuck they want to do.

NEW AND UNEXPECTED

‘Babygirl’ feels like the thesis of the album. When we wrote it, I remember thinking it was really important to have a song that describes, or narrates, my day-to-day thoughts and feelings, up here in my head. It feels like I’m describing what it’s like to be a Black girl in music and the world, in R&B and pop – and a girl that still moves to the beat of her own drum. A girl who knows her path is a little different than everyone else’s.

There’s gold in that. Staying true to that path is really the most fulfilling thing.

There was an open verse on it and I was like, ‘Doechii would be so perfect for this’! I think her career has really been a testament to that.

I remember when I saw her, a few months before I even sent her this song, I told her that when she won her Grammy, I cried! Not only because I’m so proud of her, but because I remember her saying in her speech that she prayed to God, and God told her that if she stayed on the path that felt real and true to her, she would be rewarded. That just felt so powerful to me.

Collaboration is one of the parts of making music that’s most fun. I’m someone who likes to pick features pretty thoughtfully. It’s about finding artists you feel you could learn from – it gives you a good opportunity to jump into each other’s worlds.

‘Reputation’ was one of the first songs I knew I wanted someone to be on and Dom Fike just felt like the perfect fit. That song felt like the Rihanna/Mikky Ekko ‘Stay’ moment – those two worlds collided in a really interesting way, and made something new and unexpected happen.

That’s what I look for, in my features or even in artists I love. It’s so satisfying when something happens that wasn’t really supposed to happen, but it makes perfect sense.

• Blue Island is out now. Ravyn Lenae plays Electric Picnic on August 30.