Tinashe and Ravyn Lenae lean into the paradox of ‘alt-R&B’

“I don’t like to be stuck in the ‘R&B box,’ ” Tinashe told USA Today in 2014. By that point, “R&B” had come to feel almost like a pejorative to a certain kind of artist, particularly Black women experimenting with form. As Dawn Richard put it in 2017: “Being black and having a certain tone or look automatically makes people think you belong in one thing.” To accommodate those who bristled at being so reduced, a slippery phrase, conceived by an earlier generation, worked its way back into the discourse. The term “alternative R&B” came with its own baggage, but for a singer like Tinashe, the words could be seen as representative of a moment, if not a movement, where the dimensions of R&B were shifting along sonic and commercial lines. “I listen to a lot of indie/alternative music, a lot of hip-hop,” she told Vogue that same year. “I’m always online, always on blogs. I’m a music geek.” “Always online” quickly became a hallmark for those in the space, who now not only had music history at their fingertips, but could metabolize its essence at warp speed. Practically, the term that came to define them has never felt super-useful, simply because its catch-all stance makes comparison moot, effectively defeating the purpose of subgenre. But with hindsight, it can at least be seen as a tributary — the point from which a certain kind of avant-garde music still channels its spirit and values.

This month has brought two new albums that draw from that same wellspring, and yet in execution spiral off toward separate conclusions: On the heels of her viral “Nasty” breakthrough in the spring, Tinashe seems to have fully realized her career beyond the R&B box on Quantum Baby, while the Chicagoan Ravyn Lenae breaks a similar, if more self-imposed mold on Bird’s Eye. If pressed to play along with the categorizing logic that has followed both artists to this point, you could think of the version of R&B they’ve arrived at as “post-alternative.” As Tinashe continues her push into mellow dance music, Lenae has opened up her sound to encompass the many arrays of a radiant soul spectrum, and both maneuvers seem to inform the way each artist addresses intimacy on their record.

As a concept, alternative R&B is older than its reputation. It emerged in the late ‘90s as a subset of a style the writer Gail Mitchell referred to as “real R&B” in a Billboard story from 2000 — music that, counter to the machine-driven R&B that targeted airplay like a heat-seeking missile, prioritized “more meaningful lyrics, more real instrumentation and more self-contained artists who can write, sing and play for themselves.” The “real R&B” tag was inherently a little rockist, and its alt-R&B counterpart followed suit, coming to nebulously define any R&B-adjacent artist deemed to be stretching in an unusual direction — meaning mostly rock, folk or electronic music. (“I think Gil Scott-Heron would be considered alternative R&B right now,” Elektra Entertainment’s then-VP of urban promotion told Mitchell.)

The term took on a new meaning during the Tumblrcore aesthetic consolidation of the early 2010s, when many earnest young artists in the field were as erudite about Radiohead as they were about Prince, and had begun experimenting liberally with R&B’s dynamic range. The Weeknd sampled Beach House. Frank Ocean swung from “Optimistic” to “Hotel California” to “Electric Feel” in the span of his debut tape, Nostalgia, ULTRA, even poking fun at the space he saw himself filling: “You don’t got no Jodeci or something?” a woman in his car asks during a skit. “What is a Radiohead, anyway?” Elsewhere, Jai Paul and How to Dress Well seemed to be traveling in the opposite direction on the same spectrum, indie outsiders fascinated with the swooning. Such gestures are taken for granted now, as the natural inclinations of a genreless streaming biosphere, but at the time there was true novelty in the dissolved quality of the music, the barriers shifting in real time. Gender, however, often supersedes genre in discussion, and looking at the reception of the women who have commonly shared the alt distinction — FKA twigs, Jhené Aiko, SZA, Kehlani, Jorja Smith — reveals some of its darker applications: marking out music that wasn’t actually R&B on the basis of race alone, or simply treating pure R&B traits dismissively, as obviously lesser. For a label that was supposed to symbolize possibility, it could be equally suffocating.

Tinashe has been grappling with such caveats her whole career. After going from girl-group castoff to mixtape darling in the early 2010s, recording uncrystallized lite soul music in her bedroom, the singer-songwriter was scooped up by RCA Records and seemed to be on a Top 40 trajectory. The Mustard-wave hit “2 On” showed promise, but major label stardom eluded her, in part because of an aimless musical direction that seemed to stray from the autonomy of her tapes. Courting big-time pop factory sausage makers like Max Martin and Doctor Luke never panned out. “Said I’m falling off but they won’t JFK me / Tried to be myself but they won’t AKA me,” she sang on 2018’s “No Drama,” brutally aware of her reality. Stepping away from RCA in 2019 proved freeing: The music she has released since is electric, fluid yet striking. Her music was never inhibited, but it is now imbued with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she’s after. That is the underlying insinuation of “Nasty,” a slinky song in search of a partner-in-sleaze: knowing what you’re about and needing that energy reciprocated.

“Nasty” is an interesting point of ingress for Quantum Baby. While the album isn’t exactly smut, and the particulars of “good technique,” as Tinashe puts it in the song, are never quite broached across the record, it would be a stretch to call the single a misdirect. Though matching her freak isn’t an active exercise, it is still a fundamental mandate in the rest of these songs, which are possessed by a certain forwardness. Take, as an example, the soft-focused, twitchy “Thirsty” and the atmospheric, falsetto-driven “When I Get You Alone”; the former savoring the randiness of man she’s playing with, knowing she’s going to give him what he wants, and the latter making sex feel like an inevitability. Conversely, “Red Flags” and “No Broke Boys,” strobing, mood-lit suites that radiate impatience, revel in decisively establishing boundaries. “Nasty” closes the album, but it is not tacked on: I read its function as the album’s big climax, the payoff for nearly 30 minutes of understated come-ons and rule-setting, building on its many rendezvous to ask if matching her freak is even possible.

Pegged as the second installment in a trilogy that began with 2023’s BB/ANG3L, Quantum Baby improves on its predecessor’s sense of low-key exhilaration, moving intentionally away from “petty little love games” and toward the fulfillment of skin-to-skin contact. Both albums operate at an underexplored cross section of rap and electronic rhythms, but this one is even harder to pin down. Produced by genre-straddlers like Nosaj Thing, Ricky Reed and Zack Sekoff, it seems to merge the finesse of R&B with the booming force of club sounds. In its move beyond simulation to stimulation, it drifts from ambient pop to the clicking provocations of “ratchet music.”

If Quantum Baby is often chasing the more immediate rewards of companionship, Bird’s Eye seeks something sustainable. The first words out of Ravyn Lenae’s mouth are “Paradise takes a little patience,” a temperance that Tinashe can’t be bothered with, and one that comes to define an artist frequently willing to wait. “Give it time, get up in the morning / That’s all right, never mind what we said last night.” Making hard distinctions between day and night is a recurring theme on the album (“I’ll give you all night, you give me your day,” she sings on “Candy,” making a trade), as if separating entanglement and affection in the mind. The insinuation that love is built in the days lingers. “How am I giving you room in my mind?” she asks more pointedly on “Love Is Blind,” before pivoting to a shutdown: “This is the last night for me, you can see me in your dreams / I’ll end up giving you all of my life.” You could think of that song as in conversation with Quantum Baby’s “Red Flags,” drawing a line that delineates the two albums’ moods: Tinashe is prickly where Lenae is forlorn, and though on the surface there is a sense that the latter is fed up while the former is still fiending, the way the songs play out suggest Lenae isn’t as over it as she says. As she assesses the constant maintenance of an on-again, off-again relationship on Bird’s Eye, she follows its many circles to the outer edges of an already majestic personal sound.

The course charted from Lenae’s debut, Hypnos, to Bird’s Eye is one of expansion. “I had a lot more rules placed on me,” she said of the album in an interview with The Fader. “I was like, ‘This is an R&B album. It has to be that.’ … For some reason, after a while, I felt like I had to limit myself.” Wanting to do more this time around, she worked with the Los Angeles producer Dahi, whose credits vary from the TDE stable of artists and Drake to Vampire Weekend, Steve Lacy and Nick Hakim. Here, R&B is merely the base ingredient for a slight yet soulful record of yearning that incorporates the mixer impulses of experimentalist beat makers like Flying Lotus and Kaytranada (“Bad Idea”), the sun-seeking grooves of reggae (“Candy”), ripping, glitched-out funk (“1 of 1”) and softspun, folksy blues (“From Scratch,” “Days”). There is a composed quality to the album, which feels laser-focused even as it zooms out to bring more into the frame, thanks in large part to Lenae’s ability to keep her vaporous singing out front.

Lenae has a tinsel voice that can imply a particular reticence, and she takes full advantage of it across these beaming songs, which frequently seek refuge from neediness. There is a decent amount of wishing, and of carrying on through something broken despite the signs, all emphasized by the purity and subtlety of her instrument. There are several moments of reluctant optimism, and even when the reality of the given situation seems hopeless she makes the lesson feel worth it. “Dream Girl” sets problems aside for the immediate gratification brought on by temptation, with the possibility of forever a distant afterthought. “Bad Idea” is all about trying not to get pulled back into a whirlwind romance. Sometimes she can’t help herself, and gives in: On “From Scratch,” there is a needling sensation that the relationship in question isn’t actually built to last, but when she sings, “We can start again,” tugging at that last word as if not wanting to lose it, there is a sense that its sandcastle architecture is storm-proofed by her sheer willpower. The real payoff for songs like “Love Is Blind” and the conflicted single “Love Me Not” is the closer, “Days,” which calls back to “Bad Idea” as it finally seems to put the thought of this person out of mind: “Loving you was a bad idea / But I won’t spend my whole life / Drying my tears,” she sings, before adding, “I only lost the days.” In that instant, it feels like she is finally riding off into the sunset, liberated.

In Bird’s Eye and Quantum Baby, I hear two liberated artists, rooted in R&B but not beholden to it, who, in the careful development of their synergized sounds, have found the outlets for their sensuality. R&B has forever been about intimacy, the sweeping, universal pull of being down bad and boo’d up, and a patriarch of the modern form, Babyface, once talked about it as the universal music that sprouted most American music. But it is often treated as a music off to the side, created by less serious artists, which is part of why distinctions like “real” and “alternative” exist in the first place. Even in our supposedly genreless time, it is underestimated how much genre still factors into the perception of a record — what it’s doing and who it’s for — and R&B of all types carries certain signifiers with it. Those signifiers can cut both ways: Sometimes R&B diehards see venturing beyond its borders as a betrayal, likely because so many outside those bounds don’t show respect. “Even when I started this album, I was thinking, ‘If I dip my toes in that, I might lose Black people,’ ” Lenae told The Fader. “But I can’t center my decisions around that. My music is Black music because I’m Black making music.” Listening to these records, it can feel as if the “R&B box” has weathered so much internal shapeshifting that it’s collapsed in on itself, making such decisions less and less necessary.