Every time I’ve begged my friends to listen to Ravyn Lenae’s 2024 album Bird’s Eye, I’ve followed it up with mentioning my mission to break her out of the khia asylum. I’m then always met with the same question you’re more than likely wondering right now: what is the khia asylum?
The khia (generally pronounced as key·uh) asylum is a term used among internet stan communities, which are composed of avid online users that engage in discourse on opinions about celebrities, music and other forms of media. These exist primarily on Twitter.
Before the term Khia asylum came to be, though, there was just Khia (pronounced kai·uh), an artist known almost exclusively for her catchy and vulgar 2002 song “My Neck, My Back (Lick It).” It garnered this cult classic status even in my rural Ohio hometown. It felt like a rite of passage to be shown this song for the first time in middle school. The song holds a greater impact than I think most give Khia credit for—it was sampled twice in 2017 by Saweetie and City Girls respectively, two prominent names in contemporary female rap. Despite the song’s No. 42 ranking on Billboard’s Top 100 in 2002, Khia remained relatively unknown and never broke into mainstream stardom. This doesn’t mean Khia didn’t have fans—in fact, a fan she met in 2014 forever changed the course of her online legacy.
To see such a dedicated fan was unexpected given how unknown Khia was in the grand scheme of things, and the tweets, while quite blunt, expressed confusion and amusement over the fan’s excitement. This fan meet up sparked the usage of khia as a term for artists that cannot achieve mainstream fame. The term is used both sympathetically and offensively to refer to other female artists that can’t reach mainstream success or fame. While this term would evolve to be the aforementioned khia asylum, the term khia itself is still used—they are complementary terms.
The first identifiable use of the term khia asylum is from X user @impxrfectforyou on May 2, 2024 in an infographic displaying their opinions on different female artists in the industry at the time. In short, the khia asylum is purgatory for artists struggling to find mainstream success. Its residents, according to the user at the time of posting, were Zara Larsson, Ava Max, Charli xcx, Bebe Rexha and Kim Petras.
It’s important to note that not every ticket to the khia asylum is one-way. This is the case with Sabrina Carpenter (as the graphic notes) and Charli xcx. While the graphic depicted Charli to be in the khia asylum, the overwhelming commercial success of her latest album BRAT gave her the opportunity to escape the khia asylum. This goes both ways, though, as there is no guarantee that a once-mainstream artist couldn’t be sent to the khia asylum. Many online argue that Dua Lipa was sent to the khia asylum after her album Radical Optimism did not perform as well as expected.
While @impxrfectforyou provided a good baseline list of khia asylum residents, I’d like to propose another: Ravyn Lenae. If you haven’t heard of her, maybe you’re familiar with one of her many songs that features larger artists: “Skin Tight” (feat. Steve Lacy), “One Wish” (feat. Childish Gambino), “Love Me Not” (feat. Rex Orange County), and beyond.
Ravyn Lenae released her first album HYPNOS in 2022, but she’s been making music much longer. Her first EP Moon Shoes EP was released in 2016 and she’s been releasing projects ever since. I first met her, though, through her latest body of work: her sophomore album Bird’s Eye, released in 2024. The album beautifully encapsulates the foolish highs and sobering lows of trying to make a doomed relationship work. Whether or not the two are an official couple is ambiguous, but the lyrics suggest more of a situationship-like dynamic than a committed relationship. The word “relationship” is meant to describe their dynamic relationship rather than the actual status itself.
“Genius” sets a chilling precedent for the dynamic of Lenae’s relationship. She begins the album referring to the previous night’s conflict between her and the man she loves. While there are times where things work between the two of them, “some shit gets in the way” that launches the two into verbal warfare, ultimately ending in her plea to “never mind what we said last night.” By her own admission, she realizes that “it takes communication,” yet her approach to ignoring the conflict is indicative of deeper, irreconcilable issues within her relationship that could, if not should, result in its end. Instead, she brushes off “throwing knives” and “slamming the door” with the rationale that love must come with some confrontation.
The hot and cold nature of her relationship is further explored in tracks like “Bad Idea,” where Lenae acknowledges that her engagement with this man is harming her but she is unable to break the chain of dependence. This gets messy in “One Wish,” the first slower track on the album. These themes are explored with different presentations: “One Wish” communicates this same dynamic as “Genius” but with an entirely different mood, reflecting the multitude of emotional lenses Lenae reflects on the same situation through.
The spontaneity of an unpredictable dysfunctional relationship does have an addictive effect, as reflected in the tracks where things seem to be going well for the couple. In “Dream Girl,” Lenae urges her boyfriend to “just give into the temptation” and in the following track “Candy” she declares him to be “the one.” No matter how dysfunctional other interactions can be, the moments of bliss keep her coming back.
This is a dynamic that I feel we’ve all experienced to some extent.
Despite these moments of bliss, Lenae still is able to reflect on how, if she doesn’t get her priorities straight, she will end up “giving all her life” to this relationship that is actively hurting her. In “Love Is Blind,” she commits herself in this mournful ballad to getting this man out of her mind. Quite realistically, in the following track “Love Me Not,” she battles this same idea but with a much more lighthearted tone, quickly cutting off the words she sings to reflect how abruptly he “holds her tight, then lets her go.” She recognizes his inconsistent, unpredictable behavior and how he loves her one moment and the next he doesn’t. It plays on the classic "loves me, loves me not" saying. Despite this, she even considers wanting to “get back together” with him because…the rollercoaster of emotions she's sent on in this relationship, although destructive, is exhilarating. It’s the most streamed song on the album with good reason. It’s the first song that got me hooked on this album and the song I would probably recommend most to new listeners.
The closer of the album, “Days,” is everything I didn’t even realize I needed it to be. I listen to it like a daily prayer, a reminder that “I won’t spend my whole life drying my tears” and that through all of this reflection and stewing Lenae (and I) spent the album doing, it was all in service of allowing her to move on. In losing him, Lenae never lost any part of herself, she “only lost the days” spent with him—an obvious yet powerful outlook that empowers me to embrace life after a bad relationship.
Bird’s Eye has gripping storytelling and a soulful sound that keeps beckoning me to come back and listen to a song or two—or the entire album—again. Ravyn Lenae’s unique and captivating style has entranced me just as I’m sure it will entrance you. So, what are we waiting for? Streams will help buy her a ticket out of the khia asylum, and her sentence cannot be for life!
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