Artist Spotlight: Raveena is the Sade-soft, Punjabi-rooted R&B voice your Frank Ocean playlist is missing

Some singers make you lean in. Raveena makes you lower the volume on everything else. Her voice sits close to the microphone, the drums barely knock, and a guitar line drifts in like someone opening a window.

Raveena Aurora was born on 30 September 1993 in Massachusetts to Punjabi immigrant parents, grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, in a Sikh household, and moved to Queens in New York at 17. She studied at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and has been writing with the producer Everett Orr since 2015. The result is R&B that borrows from 90s soul, Bollywood strings and dreamy indie, and never hurries.

If Blonde lives on your phone, this is the next tab. If you get lost in Sade, same. And if you are in India, she is proof that the Punjabi diaspora has been making this sound for years.

Start here

"Stronger" (2019). From her debut album Lucid (31 May 2019). Slow, glowing and about not needing a man to hold you up. The video, from June 2019, pulls her out of a grey warehouse and into the woods.

"Secret" (feat. Vince Staples), 2022. The lead single for Asha's Awakening (11 February 2022). Vince Staples raps over a hazy groove and the video plays with Bollywood imagery.

"Junebug" (feat. JPEGMAFIA), 2024. The odd one out, and our pick if you like your R&B with edges. It sits on Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain (14 June 2024), her third album.

"Pluto" and "Lucky" (2024). Both from the same album, both worth playing back to back on a long night drive.

"Headaches" (2020). From the Moonstone EP (7 February 2020), short, sweet and a good way in.

Why now

On 16 September 2026 Raveena released "Blissed Out", her first new song of the year, with a video directed by Grant Spanier. She has described it as one of her most vulnerable songs, about the aftermath of losing her mother, and the track opens and closes with her mother's voice. No album has been announced, but she has said she is excited about a new phase of her sound.

She also keeps close ties to the Indian indie scene. She appears alongside Prateek Kuhad on a track called "Bloom", and she has worked with King Krule too.

If you like Raveena, try

• Kumail, the Mumbai soul writer who spent time in Lisbon and Kinshasa.
• Mary Ann Alexander, Bengaluru's answer to Brent Faiyaz fans.
• Sheherazaad, Urdu folk-noir with a debut album due 20 November.

More on Raveena, Frank Ocean and Sade.