‘We can find renewal despite the bullshit we navigate as Black women’: Kelela on stan armies and speaking up for Gaza
More than most musicians on a typical promo cycle, Kelela has been appearing on my social feeds in increasingly surreal combinations. In one clip, she blows kisses to an enormous crowd of onlookers on the streets of Soho New York; another sees her posing for fans against a fog-strewn background somewhere between South Central and survivalist video game Silent Hill. In the video for idea 1 the singer saunters down a corridor with windswept silver hair, looking like Storm if the X-Men movies had been directed by Hype Williams. In a widely circulated tribute/parody, the track is synced uncannily well to a cut of RuPaul in the 90s strutting her stuff to the song’s throbbing guitar, while sporting a remarkably similar sleek, platinum blonde wig.
“If there were a fan competition amongst artists, I feel like I would win,” the actual Kelela tells me when we meet at a recording studio in east Williamsburg, New York. “No shade to nobody!
“But like the humor and the read are co-existing in my audience in a way that I could never have written.” Today she’s wearing a graphic mesh top, hair styled with micro bangs, and a set of glassy acrylic nails, which look as elegant folded in her lap as they do rolling a joint. Who is she today? “I’m like an angsty teenager,” she deadpans mischievously before rolling her eyes and flipping both middle fingers. “I’m like … ‘fuck everythinggg.’”
Even if she’s a little too chill to totally sell this particular punk-brat fantasy, there’s still plenty of real-world defiance to Kelela. Since her breakout mixtape Cut 4 Me in 2013, the musician has both steadily broadened her profile and sharpened her sense of purpose. The counterpoint to the more overblown enthusiasm from social media is her iron-clad certainty as an artist, which has only gotten more pronounced the more varied her work has become. In addition to a sold-out tour and high-profile collaborations with Solange, Danny Brown and Gorillaz, for a decade Kelela has stood as a major influence on young musicians seeking to marry pop hooks onto regional club beats.
“I think her consistent talent to push the boundaries of music and continue to dive into the more experimental sides of electronic sounds often pushes me to think out of the box when producing my own songs,” says PinkPantheress, who features on Kelela’s new single The Bridge, in an email. “Her work has easily widened the market and opened doors for other Black female electronic/pop artists. I truly believe that because of her we have more room to experiment and not stick to the status quo.”
In a way, the title of Kelela’s third studio album, New Avatar, is both perfectly suited and slightly on the nose. With each new release, the singer has used every tool at her disposal to not only develop a new persona but to present a vast but unified sense of self. Her shifting appearance has always complimented an ever-spiraling musical sensibility – one that’s mapped onto blistering grime, tranquil ambience and pummeling club music while remaining firmly rooted in R&B. The latest iteration of her ever-changing sound is one of her least expected and most successful to date: silky, hook-laden vocals filtered through shoegaze reverb and bracing rock music. Fascinatingly, it’s a reinvention that feels all the more impressively high-stakes now that increasingly viral versions of the singer have brought untold scores of new listeners toward her work.
Despite probably being best known for her explorations of R&B and electronic music, Kelela first made forays into music through indie rock. While living in Washington DC, she played in the band Dizzy Spells, sticking with the group long enough to record (and scrap) an EP. “It was my first time really getting into songwriting and feeling loose and free enough to kind of fuck up,” she says. Jamming with her then partner, Tosin Abasi, the lead guitarist in the progressive metal band Animals as Leaders, also helped influence her approach to music. “He was writing proggy, jazzy music with odd time signatures with really left-of-center harmonics,” she explained, “and I really fell in love with trying to find my way in these, you know, seemingly unkind sonic landscapes.”
Fascinatingly, the singer had entertained the concept for a guitar-forward album for a long time, though it had never seemed quite right for the moment. You could make out subtle hints of what was to come from some of her live arrangements made for her 2024 performances at New York’s jazz club Blue Note – in one notable passage of her 2019 mixtape Aquaphoria, she set her vocals against a bluesy Jaco Pastorius bass solo. After the release of her debut studio album Take Me Apart in 2017, Kelela’s follow-up Raven developed over an extended period of time, hindered by a “rustiness” that the singer ascribed to white supremacy and capitalism. To vet those who came onboard with that project, she compiled a syllabus of books and films for her collaborators to get a sense of how she wanted to square personal expression with other kinds of broader social alienation and repression. “I never made Raven as a bring-in [record]” the singer reflects, “that was for people who were already here… It was way more subtle, there were not a lot of big singles.”
New Avatar by contrast seems to have been made on the far other side of that rustiness, from a place of much greater ambition and self-assurance. After engaging an impressive raft of dance artists to help jump start her early releases, on the record, Kelela seems to have hit her stride with a set of core collaborators uniquely suited to help realize her ambitions. A number of long-standing relationships like producers Oscar Scheller and Asma Maroof, as well as a creative team including the artistic director, Mischa Notcutt and painter Janiva Ellis have formed a reliable core to fire off her vision. But they also seem to offer a funny perspective and productive tension to keep her ideas free-flowing and conceptually tight.
To prepare for the album, Kelela drew from what she describes as her “White Bag” playlist, a list of music that she says had previously been sold to her as white music that she absolutely loved. Then a sustained period of jamming and experimentation to settle on the record’s palette of sounds, aiming for an ideal ratio of “two-thirds guitar, one-third dance music.” The interplay between these genres is incredibly dynamic. The looped guitar and drum machine on Linknb achieves such a break-neck momentum that when the beat gradually begins to share air-time with back-and-forth samples of Memphis rappers La Chat and the Gimisum Family, it’s completely seamless. On the absolutely gutting closer If We Meet Again, a smoldering synth progression eerily reminiscent of a guitar sounds like the dying echo of an already faded relationship.
As an art writer, I was most curious about the part that Janiva Ellis had played in shaping the record. The painter’s work often features Black characters with melted-off features traversing surreal, doom-laden landscapes as though they were being poisoned by their surroundings in real time. On Idea 1, one of the two tracks in which the duo share song-writing duties, the pair drew inspiration from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel The Parable of the Sower to conjure a disintegrating relationship against a world that’s on fire, which Kelela inhabits over a crush of shoegaze guitar as her anguished cries bleed into the reverb.
“She articulates the sort of read of the world that we’re living through and having to navigate,” Kelela said, “It is the backdrop of what I’m writing about.” She paused. “Our ethics line the fuck up. We’re wanting to challenge the systems that are at play that make us suffer so it feels like our own humanity is preserved, and that we can find renewal all the time, as we have to continue to live in this world with all the bullshit that we have to navigate as Black women.”
But the sensibility that fires both women can also be quite funny, and Ellis’ role as a friend and a sounding board, a reliable presence who can make the other laugh, is also valuable to keep humor and humanity in perspective. One of the record’s most hilarious moments occurs in the bridge in the second half of new song Point Blank. As the song’s competing synth chords begin to trill and bounce like gunfire, the state of siege that Kelela experiences briefly lets up for her to succumb back to her partner’s charms: “But catch me in the dark, babe/Can you slut me out/I’m taking what I want, babe/But you can’t stay — don’t start.”
She is just as outspoken elsewhere. Last year, Kelela joined with over 400 artists in withdrawing their music from Israeli streaming services as part of the No Music For Genocide campaign. On a more regular basis, she’s unyielding in terms of centering a Black queer feminist vision, down to centering fans of color and cutting a collaboration for the album with an artist who did not share her values. Has she lost opportunities because she’s not afraid to take a stand? “Yeah,” she says. She says that she had a brand partnership shoot canned before the company changed their minds after she spoke out. “After I said something they were like, actually, don’t worry about it.” When pressed, she won’t say who it was. “I didn’t even have to pay the money back,” she says. “They were just like, we don’t want to fuck with the [bottom] line”
“The intersections that I have to deal with actually provide me with more mental fortitude and stability and like clarity around what’s happening,” Kelela explains. “I feel like part of my talent is my ability to hone in on a nuanced reality…I think the poetry comes in what I’m saying, how specific I’m being about a feeling.”
Even as her profile gets larger, and her image more widely shared than ever, it’s the granular emotion at the heart of Kelela’s project and her critical eye trained on experience that makes it so infinitely thrilling and adaptable. With her eye for subtlety would it be tempting to press the big red button and go for a massive kind of fame? “In the beginning that was like what I thought I was doing,” she reflects “but then I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I just actually really want to make avant-garde music.’ That is more important to me than like getting the numbers on the board and having the biggest career because that’s actually the delicious thing, that’s the juicy thing.”