After listening to her new EP, Making Room, Raiche wants fans to unbreak their hearts.

The 5-song EP, released on November 13, follows the R&B and soul singer rediscovering her self-worth after a tumultuous breakup, a grand closing on a past relationship that no longer served her. The chapter shows Raiche willing to leave it all behind since she’s now dating alternative and blue-eyed soul singer-songwriter Teddy Swims. Swims, who received his first Grammy nomination in the Best New Artist category this month, also brought Raiche on the first leg of his I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy tour.

“The crowd has a specific taste. So cultivating my covers to really work his crowd was really fun and cool to see, like live algorithms,” Raiche tells BET.com. “They just like real, raw, good, singer-songwriter, real depth music, which feels [like] the space that I want to be in. So it felt perfect.”

Raiche’s soulful performances resonated with the crowd from city to city, from those already familiar with her previous releases, Drive and Loveland, to those introduced to the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, native for the first time. While Swims and Raiche have strengthened their connection through love and musicality, the 28-year-old admits that between tour stops, the couple couldn’t be avoidant if there was tension.

“Obviously, I'm dating him. So it was hilarious, like, we never got away from each other,” she jokes. “We're in love and doing really great, but if we were tiffing in any type of way, it was just kind of funny, like there’s no way to get around it. We're just like ‘hi,’ and then we'd be great later on, because it just forces you to work things out and be good.”

Working through differences with Swims has proven refreshing for Raiche, who vulnerably looks back on heartbreak on Making Room. But a portion of the EP, starting with beaming opener “You Made Me,” has an uptempo sound fitting for kiss-off lyrics like “I used to love hard, won’t do it no more.”

“‘You Made Me’ definitely showed like, [having] a loving heart doesn't mean putting up with bullshit, loving hard doesn't mean not having boundaries and for me, that's kind of how I understood it to be,” Raiche says.” [I was] really being like, ‘Okay, I have boundaries now. Not you're high and low and you're up and you're down and you treat me awful. I'm not doing this anymore.’”

After the poppy second track, “Making Room,” the remainder of Making Room transitions into ballads, like the daring and vintage soul-influenced titular track and “Burn Your Clothes.” When asked what era of soul most connects to her, Raiche props to the 1960s, naming luminaries Sarah Vaughn and Nat King Cole as “so cool and eclectic and emotional.”

“I always want to, of course, have a message with my music. I want to be able to help people,” Raiche continues. “I love to have a story and a message with my music. It feels pointless and useless to me if it's not, to be honest. I was really trying to reshape and re-understand what I believed love to be and it was a positive thing for me. I wanted to inspire people to find that for themselves.”

Raiche had to face a relationship that made her feel incomplete. On Making Room, she undergoes a journey by relearning boundaries, wanting better for herself, and manifesting the foundation of love she desires. The post-breakup realization also came through Raiche reading meaningful novels like Paulo Coelho's classic The Alchemist and exploring Transcendentalism.

“I just dove into a bunch of religions like Buddhism and just opened my mind. I came from a really sheltered home and everything was one way and I just discovered what we think affects the world around us,” she says. “I became really, really, really picky about what I think about what I put in my brain and the  perspectives that I perceive and how I perceive them, really in love. I was like, ‘Why am I attracting these awful relationships? Why is this happening to me?’”

Raiche continues, “When I realized that it was all based off of my own thinking and based off of everything that I saw, I was like, ‘Okay, I can change this, I can literally make it whatever I want it to be,’ it was the most freeing feeling.”

On where she misunderstood being treated harshly in relationships as acceptable, Raiche looks to being raised in a “really sheltered” and “Christian” home, where setting boundaries was considered inappropriate. 

“I was always the type of girl in all of my relationships to wear my heart on my sleeve. If I felt uncomfortable with something, it doesn't matter,” Raiche recounts. “You just have to be the good girl and not speak up.”

Rather than letting herself wallow in victimhood, Raiche used music as her alchemy, penning relatable material that would become Making Room. She also developed a wiser outlook on dating, which she partly credits to being with Swims.

“No relationship is ever going to be perfect, because we all have our own things and we all have our own issues and that's something that I understood before all this. But it's about those key characteristics that you really love and you want in a person and building and growing that,” Raiche says.

The singer-songwriter trusted being in perfect harmony with Swims early on as “everything happened so seamlessly” and in “perfect timing.” Now, moving on from relationship toxicity, Raiche vocalizes how she wants listeners to trust themselves when seeking romance.

“How do you want to be treated? How do you want to feel in love? Set the bar really high, and then set even higher and make your expectations just really, really high in that and only look for that,” she affirms. “Only settle for that, because it's out there and it will come to you. I didn't think that I was accepting that type of love and it took me a lot to even understand that I wasn't seeing myself like that.”

Now, with a debut album in the works, Raiche fondly recalls her past musical efforts but wants to explore her songwriting depths even further. If Making Room is a fulfilling appetizer, we can anticipate more sweetness from Raiche.

“I love Loveland, but I was still really young in Loveland. A lot of those songs were recorded five years ago, so I’ve grown and changed a lot,” she says. “There's a real story to this whole project and that's something that I've always wanted in all of my music–is to have a storyline and inspiration–just something moving and compelling and real and genuine to me.”