You can’t believe it’s a song from this era. The moment Ravyn Lenae’s voice floats over those handclaps and gritty guitar licks, “Love Me Not” feels like it’s been beamed in from 1997.
Maybe 2003. That sweet spot where R&B still had grit under its fingernails and pop hadn’t been sterilised by algorithm.
Yet here it sits, one of 2025’s biggest hits, proving that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is trust in timelessness.
Released as the lead single from her second album Bird’s Eye, the track’s been tagged as R&B, soul-rock, indie rock, retro pop. Those labels barely scratch the surface.
Co-produced by Balmoris, DJ Dahi, Ritz Reynolds, Spencer Stewart, and Ely Rise (built on a decade-old sketch with Anderson .Paak), this is less throwback, more time travel.
Each era lends its best without drowning out the others.
The Song: Where Decades Collide
The production doesn’t just reference the past. It stages a proper conversation between decades.
There’s a Mark Ronson-esque brilliance here, taking the timeless groove of soul and the crispness of indie-rock and repolishing it without losing what made it work in the first place.
According to Official Charts, the track blends handclaps, gritty guitars, and a timeless groove.
The percussion snaps with Motown confidence. The guitars chime with that particular jangle that defined mid-2000s indie. Nothing sounds derivative.
Lenae and her team have turned influences into something that stands entirely on its own.
And then there’s Lenae’s voice. She delivers “Oh no I don’t need you but I miss you come here” with this breathy wistfulness that dissolves into sudden command.
It’s the tension that makes the song addictive. That constant back-and-forth between vulnerability and self-possession.
The track explores needing a partner while wanting independence, and Lenae doesn’t resolve that contradiction. She makes you want to live inside it.
The song gives off this feeling of missing someone or something. That particular ache that sits in your chest when you’re caught between wanting and knowing better.
It sounds like the golden age of 2010s pop: gorgeous and complex, unafraid to sit with discomfort while delivering hooks that burrow into your brain for days.
The Journey to Virality
The song’s path to success has been anything but conventional. After dropping in May 2024, it picked up steam on TikTok in October thanks to a mashup with Solange’s “Losing You”.
Then it just took on a life of its own. The viral success from that TikTok mashup earned Lenae her first top-25 Billboard entry, and the momentum hasn’t stopped.
What’s remarkable is how organic it all feels. As Variety reports, Lenae was celebrating Christmas with her family when her digital team texted that it was time to lean into social media.
Within weeks, the song exploded from thousands to hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos, soundtracking everything from relationship drama to fashion fits. It became unavoidable, but in the best possible way.
The Visuals
The self-directed music video dropped in August 2024, with Lenae taking full creative control of her vision. Shot in formfitting styling that’s equal parts casual and carefully considered, the video captures someone caught in that liminal space between needing someone and needing to be alone.
The aesthetic leans into what Lenae calls her “fairy godmother, otherworldly creature” persona. Speaking to NYLON, she describes her style as an exaggeration of what already lives inside her: “this fairy godmother, otherworldly creature.
She wants to jump, she wants to dance, she wants to shout.” That energy translates to screen.
The video moves through intimate spaces that feel both grounded and dreamlike, mirroring the song’s refusal to settle into just one emotional register.
The Lyrics: A Modern Romance in Fragments
The genius of “Love Me Not” is how it captures the messy reality of modern relationships without offering easy answers.
The title plays on that childhood game of plucking flower petals (“he loves me, he loves me not”), but Lenae updates it for an era where relationships exist in perpetual states of maybe.
She’s not asking whether someone loves her. She’s wrestling with whether she even wants them to. As Lenae told Billboard, working with co-writer Sarah Aarons throughout Bird’s Eye was transformative: “Having someone through the entire thing who understands my perspective and the way I want my stories to be told and written was so beautiful.”
Lines oscillate between defiance and desire, independence and need. She even brings God into the conversation: “Lord, take it so far away / I pray that, God, we don’t break.”
It’s about being in love with uncertainty itself, about the strange comfort of keeping someone at arm’s length while secretly hoping they’ll come closer. Every verse walks this tightrope, and Lenae never loses her balance.
The Verdict
“Love Me Not” is that rare thing: a song that sounds instantly familiar yet wholly original. Lenae herself says it’s about merging “things that kind of contradict each other; something that feels old and familiar but also new and fresh.” She’s nailed it.
This track could soundtrack a summer in any decade but feels urgently, specifically now.
For an artist who’s been building her craft for nearly a decade, this moment feels earned. The song works because it doesn’t try too hard.
It’s a beautiful, bittersweet meditation on the impossibility of modern love, wrapped in production so sleek you could see your reflection in it.
It’s a buoyant R&B throwback that fits at pool parties and beach hangs, but it’s also the kind of song you play on repeat at 2am when you’re trying to figure out what went wrong.
That contradiction is what makes “Love Me Not” not just a hit, but a standard: the kind of song that’ll be rediscovered and revered long after the TikTok trends fade.
Ravyn Lenae has arrived. And she’s brought the golden age with her.