Lennie Rayen is exactly where she wants to be. The Ontario-based musician has spent the past years quietly carving out a place for herself, making the music that feels right for her; a career making music feels like the only possible option. “One step and i’m closer to it / I can’t work another shift,” she sings with a self-aware wryness on her debut album, Entertain The Space. The idea of having to clock in again at a dead-end job that isn’t her making music feels like hell for her. “More than anything, songwriting is where I feel most like myself,” Rayen explains when talking about the album. “It is where I am the most honest, and it remains the truest form of expression for me.”
Rayen uses Entertain the Space to explore the gradually emerging sense of freedom that songwriting allows her. While not wholly different from her earlier single or 2023’s Believe That It’s Blue EP on a sonic level, her debut album has her addressing conscious choices and deliberate steps out of the shadows. She’s still nervous and unsure, but in a way that anyone is about life, love, and looming anxiety. “I’m feeling quiet in this room full of laughter / I wanna talk but I feel like i’m an actor” she confesses on the timid “Time Like It’s Wind”. Her hushed delivery across the album evokes comparisons to Billie Eilish at moments, maybe even a downcast Julia Jacklin in flashes. With her strummed electric guitar at centre of all the tracks here, Rayen feels very much like any other bedroom pop artist edging into the spotlight. “If I could only brace / For when I take the stage,” she divulges from the get-go on opening track “Show Me Your Feelings”.
At its best, that nervousness can feel close to palpable, like you as the listener are intruding on a personal moment. The aforementioned opener leads you in with the soft thud of a bass drum and what feels like a lonesome wallow; it sounds like Rayen coming out of her shell in real time, confronting stagefright and finding the courage to start. Across the album she speaks up more and more, confronting the societal shortcomings of those around her. “Don’t go breaking your back for the ones who never call,” she warns on “What Now”, while on “You Like It” there’s the slightest hint of vitriol in her delivery of “God I hate how I’m trying / Does it feel good? / Giving nothing.”
Entertain The Space doesn’t move the needle in terms of downer bedroom indie rock, but it does count as a step forward for Rayen herself. Her best moments here show she has a knack for channeling that bummed out feeling, and the most memorable songs here can catch you as they spiral downwards. Producer and collaborator cleoemo dresses up the ten tracks here but never opulently so. The lightly grunge-tinged lead single “Give It Up” is Rayen’s loudest moment here, wiry guitars and warbled vocal effects dressing up an infectious chorus. “Blue Pill” (which tracks Rayen coming to terms with a family member struggling with addiction) is enveloped in a haze, a suitably blissed out aura that lets lines like “There’s nothing that I could do, or I can say, that would cure you now / I’m not gonna blame you / But I can’t stick around” sink that bit deeper. However, elsewhere on “Snake Song” the stylophone-esque guitars feel tacked on and a little clunky, like dressing for a track that still sounds underdeveloped.
Come the end of the album, closing track “Right To Me” has Rayen stepping forward and taking the plunge, embracing risk and not letting fear hold her back. “Lay it all out on the table / In case I don’t know / If I’ll live to see tomorrow,” she sings, her tone noticeably more optimistic than at the start of the album (despite the pessimistic way the lines read). The countenance of the track differs little from what precedes it, but like with all of Rayen’s music, small steps are giant bounds for her. Entertain The Space may not hit the top of many lists come the end of the year, but for Rayen it’s the peak where clouds will hopefully part to reveal higher ground still. The journey is an uphill one, but as said, Rayen is exactly where she wants to be.
