In a climate where plenty of artists prefer to cloak their reference material in secrecy, Kelela draws a refreshingly complete map. She’s so effective at communicating her musical ideas because she’s willing to share exactly what she’s studying for inspiration. For the past 13 years, she’s nurtured this curiosity alongside a deep sense of familiarity with her core audience, bringing them with her as she’s fused R&B vocals into multiple musical traditions: East Coast club, drum’n’bass, ambient, and her hometown D.C.’s go-go. When I interviewed the Maryland-raised singer about the remix version of 2023’s Raven, she was reading Amiri Baraka’s landmark 1963 work Blues People. “It’s making me feel very affirmed in my practice. The bridge-building and world-connecting that I’m doing,” she said at the time. She’s the quintessential music geek, visibly giddy to demonstrate her place within the pantheon of Black musicians across generations and genres.
Raven ended a years-long reprieve from public life by using metaphorical interpretations of water and emergence to lay out the importance of intentional solitude. It was the perfect post-pandemic record—reveling in IRL connection while still possessing the skills to embrace hermitude. It also solidified Kelela’s gift for intuition: knowing what people need to hear because she, too, is traversing similar sentiments. With her new album, new avatar, Kelela reintroduces her connection to her punk roots as she makes another case for those instincts.
“The reality is, things aren’t better. Things have not been solved,” she said of her approach to the album in an interview with the Parisian DJ and journalist Naomi Clément. “Everything’s deeper into the shit, actually.” The mood is considerably heavier, especially in comparison to whatever early 2023 felt like. The U.S., in particular, has been directly engaged in assaults on foreign governments for nearly three years. The economy has suffered as a result. The tough job market is especially tough for Black women, who account for nearly 55 percent of female job loss in 2025, despite representing only 14 percent of the female workforce. Of course relationships—romantic or otherwise—would be strained. So when Kelela points to “shittiness,” the feelings expressed aren’t necessarily new, but they are intensified in response to crisis. What is new—at least to most—is that Kelela is executing her message through what she calls “guitar music,” which, in this case, is the indie and punk rock she enjoyed for much of her youth in the D.C. suburbs. What instrument could be a more natural choice to express a profound sense of rage, angst, and uncertainty?
Over producer Oscar Scheller’s shoegaze beat on “idea 1,” Kelela loses patience with a lover who’s suspended in an emotional stasis. “Pride and delusion, hide the solution deep in the ground,” she nudges, before getting to a more seething question: “Are you alive?” On “goin down,” the strums establish tension early as she constructs the story of a significant other who has betrayed her trust. Her falsetto on the pre-chorus pairs perfectly with the light strings before things take a heavier turn on the hook, bringing visions of Janet Jackson’s brief leather-clad, dance-rock moment in the late 1980s.
For years, Kelela has referenced her participation in D.C.’s hardcore scene during her teens and early 20s, always hinting that, when the time was right, she’d dip her toe back in. The most readily available documentation of her music prior to 2013’s breakthrough Cut 4 Me is a 2009 Washington City Paper article about a performance by a then-new local band called Dizzy Spells. The linked MySpace account no longer yields any music. But according to writer Jonathan L. Fischer, the sound was “ethereal and deeply felt or playful and jagged” and self-described as “rock/Americana/neo-soul,” though this designation “ignores the woozy trip-hop sound that’s all over.” All these years later, Kelela is still a natural at the balancing act.
Nonetheless, there are sweet surprises throughout new avatar. The trip-hop that Washington City Paper clocked back in ’09 shows up with some elements of psych-rock on “against me,” à la Portishead, but the earnest crooning she pulls off on top is something original unto herself. She summons Burial’s slowed UK garage-meets-ambient sound on the flirtatious “don’t piss me off.” Rather than raging in the punk tradition, her voice is an elegant and flexible participant in the compositions. She’s said that Scheller, who produced all but one track, encouraged her to lean into her dejection vocally. Building from that foundation, much of new avatar still possesses an R&B ethos, even when specific production and instrumentation choices suggest otherwise. “One of my theses for this album is that R&B is probably the most expansive genre in the world,” she said during her BBC 1Xtra interview. “What I’ve done is find my way on a landscape that isn’t typically approached with R&B vocals.”
There are plenty of familiar moments on new avatar as well, magnifying a commitment to the dancefloor while harkening back to her solidified classics. The blaring synths and faint breakbeats on “point blank” could easily place it on Cut 4 Me. British singer and producer A.K. Paul joins her on the syrupy “outta time” for a duet about the pitfalls of a codependent relationship. (Kelela told Naomi Clément that the two recorded the song for 2017’s Take Me Apart but she couldn’t fit it into the album’s final version.) “In my feels before sunrise/Information all the time/Overwhelming by design,” she sings on “retaliation lullaby,” apparently scrolling while a partner she’s bored of sleeps; gloomy strings reverberate alongside gentle background thunder, summoning a drumless atmosphere that would have made a seamless fit on Raven. Even the PinkPantheress-featuring downtempo DNB single “the bridge” has an evergreen Kelela-ness to it: a two-step inducing jam that would always be welcomed in the function.
On “new life forms,” a personal highlight, Kelela arrives at the confluence of almost every mood she’s conjured up to this point. Jersey-raised singer Fousheé appears for a song that stacks dreamy guitar, vocal interplay, drums that do just enough, and synths like a perfectly navy night sky. And, in comparison to new avatar’s overarching theme of strained relationships, this one feels like a genuine good time with a person you’re into. Kelela rejoices over physical touch, a cool breeze that keeps blowing out the spliff, and a general sensation of weightlessness. Fousheé comes in melodically rapping about taking shrooms on the beach, topless, instructing us to “blast these fuckin’ speakers till there’s hearin’ loss.” But the fun is short-lived and, in this context, “new life forms” might be a case of romantic delusion before the bottom fully falls out.
Raven answered a years-long plea from Kelela fans to resurface, and she did so with the kinds of resources we’d never seen her possess before. The stakes for new avatar don’t feel quite as high—the specific circumstances around the former was a perfect storm that'll be tough to duplicate—but the music isn’t any less potent for it. The new album builds on an already robust legacy of creative expansion for an artist who refuses to be one-note.
