Ravyn Lenae – Love Me Not

A title we’re not listening to…

[Video]
[7.00]

Nortey Dowuona:
he loves me not: A frustrating loop of Tame Impala funk below one of the most beautiful voices in R&B — who has smartly noticed the appeal of Tame Impala but with good singing.
he loves me: A gorgeously sung little ditty about codependence and desperation that never rises out of Lenae’s range but sinuously creeps into your heart.
he holds me tight: It’s a frustrating state of affairs she needed that shite added verse from Rex Orange County to buoy the song up the “charts”, which don’t matter.
he lets me go: But it peaked at #41, which means the folk who needed to hear this heard it.
he loves me not: The handclaps are programmed in such a flimsy way — the rigidity of the pattern does not support that fabulous refrain.
he loves me: That refrain is so essentially perfect. It’s on the tip of your tongue the minute you hear it once.
he holds me tight: Let it be known that I was there at “Blossom Dearie,” which should’ve been the hit!
he lets me go: But I did miss out on this lowkey jam, more fool me
he loves me? Of course.
[10]

Julian Axelrod: When I wrote about Ravyn Lenae’s “Light Me Up” as my selection for TSJ’s Amnesty 2022, I framed it as the culmination of five years of meticulous development. But it’s only taken her half that time to level up into the world of festival appearances, magazine covers and Ty Dolla $ign features. And to top it all off, she has a genuine word-of-mouth hit that’s also one of the best songs of her young career. “Love Me Not” is heartfelt, hooky and headstrong, a pop juggernaut in the unassuming skin of an R&B masterpiece. It’s a signature song from an artist that makes everyone feel like they discovered her.
[8]

Claire Davidson: It’s always a little startling when the pop cultural window creeps beyond the expected 20-year window into an more recent era. With “Love Me Not,” Ravyn Lenae seems to be pulling from late-aughts/early-2010s indie pop, complete with a vocal filter that seems to slightly compress her voice. I hear Santigold as a clear influence. The song’s fundamentals are robust, allowing Lenae to saunter over a rollicking bass line before her true yearning bursts forth on the chorus against warmer guitar tones, as she laments her infatuation with a partner sending mixed signals. Yet it’s those slight stylistic touches emphasizing Lenae’s distance from the material that keep me from loving this track. Rather than allowing her voice full space to breathe, that filter forces her to rely on reedy multitracking that becomes grating on an otherwise infectious chorus. The bridge, too, feels like a missed opportunity: choosing restrained cooing over shrill keyboard tones, rather than the unvarnished sincerity that could’ve made this song truly heartbreaking.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Instrumental’s fine, but I just can’t with the vocal quirk.
[3]

Leah Isobel: Ravyn is a charming and dexterous presence, but “Love Me Not” doesn’t really serve her — her subtlety gets buried underneath layers of schticky throwback artifice. 
[6]

Andrew Karpan: That Anderson .Paak nostalgia bullshit (complimentary) 
[8]

Tim de Reuse: As with many TikTok-hits, its strategy is to take five seconds of candy-shine perfection and scaffold a song around it, but “Love Me Not” has an agreeable schtick past that: it portrays the pain of indecision through constant momentum, setting up a whole bunch of little interlocking parts that never stop whirring. The little chromatic walkup that the bassline executes at the end of the chorus is pure dopamine. In the long run, though, I think it’s too edgeless — too cleanly produced and cleanly delivered — for its emotional weight to remain in the memory.
[8]

Mark Sinker: It’s unlike her to be so arid, but maybe that’s the point: the oldest lesson in human history (or at least since love arrived as an individual option) is that you can’t facts-and-logic someone else out of their daisy-petal game, however futile or dreary their stuckness seems. Snap out of it, Ravyn! 
[5]

Melody Esme: Killer bassline, solid retro soul tune. Feels like it should get way bigger at the climax, but then the strings come in…
[6]

Jel Bugle: A nice song, easy on the ear, quite wholesome.
[8]

Dave Moore: This song seems awfully small (if cozy) for such a huge breakthrough, which is maybe one reason it broke through? Diorama-pop — is that something?
[6]

Kayla Beardslee: I think of Ravyn Lenae’s signature sound as slow, silky, and hypnotic — see our string of [8]s for “Light Me Up” — so “Love Me Not” is an unusual turn toward the upbeat for her. But she pulls off pleasing pop hooks just as well as slinky R&B. Of course she does — with her consistency, I’m sure Ravyn Lenae could conquer the world, if she wasn’t so dedicated to keeping it low-key. I’ll just settle for her finally having a much-deserved breakout hit instead.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: As with the Steve Lacy boomlet of 2022, I agree with the general direction here even if I am confused by the specific choices of the streaming public. Why this song, out of the dozens of wonders Ravyn Lenae has made in the past decade? I’m just happy we get to give her her flowers; quibbling at the margins feels counterproductive.
[8]