For Kelela, selecting a single album to define every five years of your life is an abominable prospect. “I mean, I like the game, but I just can’t,” she says while seated on a peach-colored couch in her Brooklyn studio, rolling a joint with her extra long nail extensions. Growing up, she explains, “I was struggling trying to hone in on one thing. I was listening to Mariah Carey but I was also listening to Incubus. Maybe that complicates this for you, but that’s my genuine real self.”
More than a decade ago, Kelela entered the musical ether just as a new wave of avant-R&B was cresting. The ice-cool beats of her first EPs, Cut 4 Me and Hallucinogen, lived in a nook between grime, R&B, and deconstructed club, while Take Me Apart funneled all the genre fuckery of those early records into a masterful narrative of heartbreak. She further expanded the idea of what her music could sound like in 2023, releasing an immersive ambient album called Raven then following it up with In the Blue Light a set of live jazz renditions of her catalog recorded at the Blue Note.
On a cursory glance, her latest project, new avatar, which travels through grunge, shoegaze, and touches of nu metal, might seem in opposition to her sonic identity. But guitar music has always been part of her journey. Before Kelela was hanging out with genre-agnostic collectives in Los Angeles and, later, skulking around the club scene in New York, she was singing in small graffiti-tagged venues in Washington D.C. as the frontwoman of indie rockers Dizzy Spells. She also spent years jamming with boyfriend Tosin Abasi of the progressive metal act Animals as Leaders.
But to say that new avatar is only a rock album would also be incomplete, since it also includes UK garage, New Orleans bounce, and her own Fade to Mind-era fractured R&B. “When I first started sessions for the new album, I was like, Oscar, I know I’m going into the guitar zone, but I don’t want to abandon dance music,” she says, referring to her producer, Oscar Scheller. “That has always been an ethic of mine. I don’t want to abandon this other thing in order to make a new statement.”
The timing for new avatar’s arrival—and its ongoing tour—is auspicious. Rock is everywhere, and, more notably, it’s omnipresent in the world of Black alt-pop. Albums from Black femme stars Ravyn Lenae, Nia Archives, and Kelsey Lu are centered around the guitar, channelling the angst, nostalgia, and drama of the kind of music countless Black kids tucked away in secret playlists in high school. “I did not do that on purpose,” says Kelela, about the album’s synchronicity with this moment. “I was honestly just like, this is what they don’t know they need right now. Black people who have always listened to alternative music, those are the people I made it for.”
The music that made Kelela herself is, unsurprisingly, just as diverse as her work. Her universe is filled with Ethiopian tapes, long nights downloading suspect links on Napster, and even the classical charms of The Sound of Music.
Tracy Chapman: Tracy Chapman
My parents had a pretty tight record collection. If we had any music, they were tapes for the most part. Ethiopian music always existed in the background, which we listened to during weekend gatherings. But the music I was really studying was American. The first was Tracy Chapman’s first record. That was a tape my dad had in his car, a light blue ‘88 Pontiac Lemans—and he really cared about his tapes, it was this whole thing. With this record, I think my dad was secretly trying to embed a certain politic in my five-year-old brain, so we would listen to it all the time. It’s a front to back situation. I know the number of seconds of silence. I can sing the next song in the right key. It’s that embedded in my body. Honestly, they’re all bangers. I’m looking through the tracklist right now: “Across the Lines,” brilliant. “Fast Car” is just extremely emotive. They all speak to a certain type of tenderness in a cold world, you know what I mean? Like, I’m maintaining a certain type of softness, I’m fighting for that softness, and the world is by default pretty unkind.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
