This past Friday marked the first day of the 2025 Coachella Music Festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. At 2:35, the high-flying vocalist Ravyn Lenae performed at the Mojave Tent across thousands of acres of manicured emerald grass. Even in the desert heat, a thundering crowd of Coachella goers greeted Lenae with a roar of excitement as she stepped out in a fairytale leather, two-piece set. Lenae’s lengthy red hair contrasted the natural tones of her Renaissance-era garb while she demanded attention on stage without missing a single vocal beat.
Her recent Bird’s Eye album era harps on the growing pains many face amid experiencing the emotional symptoms of fallen lovesickness. Her signature singing notes rose high into the warm air while the Mojave Tent vibrated with dust, infectiously light energy, and dancing festival goers.
Lenae’s fashions for her sophomore musical chapter are about “keeping a sultry, sensual, and sexy feel” but “with a Renaissance, almost Victorian visual language,” Ravyn says during a Zoom call directly after her short stint at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City a week before Coachella. The “Love Me Not” artist earned her first Billboard Hot 100 entry with the track and has been absorbing all the new listeners after being a professional singer for over a decade. “These seasoned artists like Lizzo and Chappell [Roan] who’ve been here for 10 plus years have just recently blew up,” Lenae says of her peers. “We are in a time where people are just honoring the time that people put in, and they are excited about it.”
The 26-year-old performer with a singing register that defies gravity has a close partnership with her stylist, Sakinah Bashir. “We’ve developed such a strong chemistry and relationship over this past year,” Lenae speaks on her friendship with Sakinah. “Honestly, [at Coachella], we are keeping that through line of what we’ve already established with the album and expanding on it in certain ways.”
Stylist Sakinah Bashir and Lenae met a year back and have since developed in-sync tendencies where they share similar tastes in attire worn at fashion’s busiest runway shows. Lenae has been donning designer wear from brands like Luar, Burberry, and Acne under the direction of Bashir’s vision. “At Coachella, we can kind of push the boundary,” Sakinah says to me on Zoom, a day before departing Los Angeles to go jet off to do the styling prep for Ravyn’s daytime set in Indio. “We are in this new era, we kind of portray notes of Renaissance, [and] newer Victorian era mixed with an early 2000 Aaliyah grunge,” she further explains.
Lenae’s recent musical work manages to capture the throes of romance and life while aging through the tail-end of your youth. She stepped out for Weekend 1 in a KNWLS London Spring/Summer 2025 look that has off-white shoulder coverage and the poised structure of an earth-colored knight. Her set picked up as the winds did, and Lenae filled out a high-fashion chevalier fit with exposed hips and a framed corset design and a detailed, draped skirt.
The R&B indie musician from Chicago has never been to Coachella despite living in Los Angeles for years. However, she is ecstatic over the fact that the first time she is going is as a performer: “A lot of my Coachella performance is me rehearsing and thinking about the set up, making sure that I’m catering to my OG fans but then also for the many new people who will be discovering me. I want to hit that sweet spot.”
Ravyn Lenae’s performance of her classic hit “Sticky” and contemporary tracks like “Days” and “Genius” solidify the fact that she is a timeless act. A singer with truly supernatural vocal capabilities who mirrors the retro, funky music of the 1950s and onwards that have given new-age artists like Lenae a paved pathway towards modern success. “It’s just so cool to see people think that ‘Love Me Not’ is a song from the early 2000s, or the 50’s, 60’s or the 70s. It shows it had all the makings of a timeless song,” she adds.
