Kelela’s New Avatar

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Well before Kelela had finished touring for her 2023 album, Raven, she knew what her future would look like. “I’ve been knowing what the next thing is,” the 43-year-old musician says from an S-shaped couch in Big Mercy Sound’s control room. “I just needed to really hunker down and find the people who I wanted to make that with.”

She’d been feeling nostalgic and had started building a playlist around the rock, indie, and alternative music she’d loved when she was in her teens and twenties: Metric, Deftones, Incubus, Red Hot Chili Peppers. She called it her “white bag” playlist. “I was telling my friends, ‘I’m about to get in my white bag, y’all,’” she says. “Everybody was like, ‘Kelela…’”

What she meant by the title was that, somewhere along the way, guitar-forward music “got owned by white people in this weird way,” she says. “That’s what I was looking to disrupt.” 

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Kelela started to think about the kinds of stripped-down guitar sounds that Joni Mitchell created on Hejira, or that emerged from the duo Buke and Gase. It was music that meant a lot to her long before the public came to know her — back when she fronted a metal band called Dizzy Spells and was still plugged into the scene in her hometown of DC. “I’ve always been interested in finding language for what I’m experiencing socially and systemically,” she says. 

To capture these trains of thought, she started hosting a series of jams with musicians and producers in Los Angeles. She has long been known as a radical in the dance music scene, blending electronica with American R&B and UK drum and bass in rarely predictable ways. But what emerged from those jams was surprising, even to her: fuzzy, grunge-y, guitar-forward. 

Disruption has long been Kelela’s artistic mission. Her debut mixtape, Cut 4 Me, released in 2013, was ambitious and futuristic, while her full lengths — Take Me Apart in 2017 and Raven six years later — not only further cemented her as a visionary in both the dance music and R&B spaces but set her apart as a great thinker. Raven, in particular, saw Kelela explore what it meant to be a Black woman in the dance music scene. In the years following the Black Lives Matter movement and the uprisings of 2020, she saw those spaces expand and diversify. But Black women were still the ones being asked to hold people in power accountable. And as Kelela quickly learned, that work was starting to feel neverending. “A thread in a lot of my work is my experience with misogynoir,” she said in a 2022 interview. “While all of this was happening, I had also hit a real hard wall with men. I needed some renewal.” 

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In July, Kelela released what is just her third studio album in a career that spans more than a decade. new avatar was written from a place of desperation: As Donald Trump started his second term, the news everywhere got worse, and things started to feel more dire. Before, Kelela says, she felt as though she was “witnessing something crumbling.” By that point, it was just rubble. 

With a guitar, she unearthed a level of rawness and grit she had never explored before. That feeling alone inspired her. “It was really gratifying,” she says. 

It has been just as gratifying for her audience. At a ColorsxStudios listening party in Bushwick, fans were rapt as she played each song and explained its backstory. This wasn’t the usual pop pandemonium; members of the crowd were sincere in their engagement with the star, who had probably soundtracked their lives for the past decade. 

“Even seeing how her fans interact with her, it’s very respectful,” says producer Oscar Scheller, her creative partner on new avatar. Online, those fans have posted about digging into the album’s influences, references, and sonic layers as if they were reading through a syllabus. Meanwhile, critics have referred to the album as Kelela’s “most accomplished yet,” celebrating its cohesion and experimentation. 

The acclaim is deserved. new avatar has touches of everyone from D’Angelo to Linkin Park (the latter seen in the smooth, nu-metal-inspired track “linknb”). But the sound is still wholly and uniquely Kelela. Electronica is at the center, with whispers of trance and drum and bass pulsating beneath. The bursts of electric guitar and drums on songs like “goin down” and “crystalize” are like delicious, rugged accents. “My ultimate dream is riffs in the club,” Kelela explains. 

In some ways, the “new avatar” is the act of unleashing Kelela’s potent combination of fury-plus-euphoria. It’s something that only she could have come up with. “She’s the blueprint for a lot of artists,” Scheller says. He first explored her discography when he started working with PinkPantheress, who made it clear that, for Scheller to understand the kind of sound she wanted, he had to get familiar with Kelela’s work.

Still, Kelela’s blueprint is constantly evolving — although there are familiar notes. “The reality is: N****s ain’t shit and the world is crumbling even more,” she says. “If I’m still dealing with that, my audience is most likely dealing with that. We’re all having to navigate the same structures. Maybe I have more conviction now.”

Kelela and I meet at Big Mercy Sound on a gloomy Tuesday in June because it’s where she recorded some of her new album. She also worked out of her home on the Lower East Side, in addition to studios in Los Angeles and London. She’s as effortlessly cool as you’d expect: Today, her hair is black and pin-straight with microbangs. Her long-sleeve top is colorful and chaotic, contrasting against the clouds outside. She has her right leg hooked under her left on the couch, showing off a pair of patent leather tabi boots.

She’s describing the jam sessions in LA, and her face lights up as we come to how she first met Scheller. Her friend LSDXOXO encouraged her to work with him; the London-born Scheller had just been part of PinkPantheress’ and Lily Allen’s most recent, very buzzy releases. Kelela agreed to visit Scheller at his studio. “I walked in and saw the guitars, and I was like, ‘Hey, what’s happening here?’” she recalls. When Scheller revealed that he was an indie boy, she was thrilled. “I found somebody who could help me find the intersections [between] the guitar and the club,” Kelela says.

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Scheller’s background is based in the New Rave scene of the early millennium. But he remembers bonding with Kelela over bands like Deftones, Incubus, and Pinback. “It was a meeting of the minds,” he says. While working with Kelela, he also got to explore one of his untapped musical curiosities: R&B. “I didn’t feel like I had license, being from the UK and being white, so it was my secret love,” he says. “We both had the experiences of not feeling like we had permission to do something in a parallel way.”

In their first session, the pair made lead single “idea 1,” a statement piece that thrilled longtime fans of the singer with its atmospheric grunge. They also wrote “don’t piss me off,” with its gritty garage beat. 

In Scheller, Kelela found a collaborator who was just as interested in the intersection of these particular sounds. “The first thing that struck me was how free she was,” Scheller says. Many of their songs were born out of jams. “We would play a beat and then she would go into a trance-like state singing these gorgeous melodies,” Scheller says. “At the same time, she was very precise.”

The pair grew close enough that Kelela helped Scheller break his lease in Los Angeles so that he could move to New York City. “We were sitting in her apartment, and we wrote a letter to my landlord together,” he says. “She really does life admin for so many people.”

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For new avatar, Kelela dug deeper into the subject matter that had inspired Raven. She knew that if she was still struggling with the same fear, anxiety, and sense of isolation she’d been feeling in 2023, her audience would be, too. So she hit “some of the same points, just articulated in a different way,” she says. With new avatar, “maybe there’s more eye roll. There’s a lot more attitude.” 

As with every Kelela album, the songs appear to be deeply, thoughtfully researched. She revisited Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as she began writing “idea 1.”