Raveena is a queer, South Asian, female artist who straddles themes of spirituality and sexuality. She’s someone, she says, who “hasn’t existed in mainstream pop music” before. Does she worry this could alienate potential fans? Not at all. “Obviously it’s a bit more challenging for listeners, but I also think they want to be challenged, and experience art that lives outside consumable soundbites,” she says. After two EPs and a debut album, 2019’s Lucid, she felt confident enough to commit to music that is eleborate, yes, but not impenatrable. “One of my closest friends said this really beautiful thing,” she recalls. “‘You made an album that’s so nuanced, and complex, and has so many different facets to it, and layers, and you spent so many years working on it. You have to give people that amount of time to understand it and digest it.’”
Raveena Aurora was born in Queens, New York, into a family who fled their native north India after her maternal uncle was killed in the 1984 Sikh pogrom. “We had a really big Indian family, and I grew up around a lot of Sikh culture,” she tells me over video call from her Los Angeles home. “I grew up in a very religious home, around a lot of spiritual people with deeply ingrained practices.” Her grandfather used to practise reiki – a form of energy healing – on her whenever she had a stomach ache. From a young age, Raveena was taught to tune into the language of the otherworldly and supernatural: “My family members all agree that God lives in nature and space, and that’s what I believe too.”
