We’re hunkered down in a dark stairwell on the side of a hotel facing a busy street in Hollywood. To passersby, we could easily be mistaken for two teenagers hiding in the shadows. In reality, I’m sitting with Kelela, the electronic R&B architect whose uncompromising vision has quietly reshaped the contours of alternative music.
Dressed in oversize sunglasses, an acid-washed tee, light blue jeans, checkered Vans and a vibrant auburn-colored French bob with micro bangs, she effortlessly rolls a joint with long ombre nails that mimic smoke and fire. She slips it between her lips and flicks a lighter stamped with a single word: Gotham.
Her lighter choice is pure coincidence, she says, but it fits the apocalyptic visual universe she’s built for “New Avatar,” her dark, guitar-heavy third album that merges her early D.C. indie roots with shoegaze, grunge, futuristic club music and R&B. Produced almost exclusively by Oscar Scheller — who has crafted tracks for PinkPantheress and Lily Allen — the 12-track project finds Kelela chasing intimacy, desire and emotional refuge in the midst of an increasingly chaotic world. From the color-inverted cover art to her icy white hair and bleached brows in the video for “idea 1” — a song that draws inspiration from Octavia Butler’s 1993 sci-fi classic “Parable of the Sower” — the world-building is unmistakable.
“I used it to describe the context … of these stories on the record,” Kelela explains about the Gotham visual concept. “It’s a basic reference, but it feels like it applies. It’s the context for people needing to be saved and everything being f— on some level, but there still being hope.”
Just a few miles from the Hollywood stairwell where we’re sitting, Kelela will translate her genre-flexing record for the stage at the Wiltern during two back-to-back shows on Sept. 21 and 22.
Although she’s a New Yorker now, Los Angeles plays a crucial role in her musical journey. In 2010, the Ethiopian American singer-songwriter moved to Venice to work as a nanny before taking a gig as a solar panel telemarketer — a job she picked to avoid moving back home but unexpectedly excelled at.
“I’ve sold solar power to hundreds of people in the L.A. area,” she quips. “I would level with people. I didn’t sound like a salesperson because I can’t sell something that doesn’t make sense.”
The job funded her first solo apartment in MacArthur Park, but an insurance payout from a totaled car ultimately gave her the financial runway to leave sales behind and focus solely on music. That freedom manifested into her debut mixtape “Cut 4 Me,” featuring fan favorites like “Send Me Out” and “Bank Head.”
“It’s a very L.A. story,” she says with a laugh.
More than 10 years after the breakthrough record, Kelela returned to L.A. to record “New Avatar” with Scheller at his home studio in Silver Lake.
During their first session, she played him “Outta Time,” a track featuring British singer-producer A.K. Paul (Jai Paul’s brother) that she’d been holding onto for a decade until she was ready to make her first guitar-centered album. She also showed Scheller her “white bag” playlist — a collection of indie, rock and alternative tracks she loved as a teenager, from Incubus to Deftones to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He understood the assignment and by the end of their session, they walked away with two songs: the lead single “Idea 1” and the sensual, U.K. garage-infused “Don’t Piss Me Off.”
“I had a sketch and I think that felt very magical,” Kelela says.
Their natural flow was part of the reason why Kelela was able to release “New Avatar” sooner than previous albums. It arrives just three years after its predecessor, “Raven.”
But leaning into her “white bag” wasn’t just about nostalgia. It’s a return for the artist who was once the frontwoman of indie rockers Dizzy Spells and was rocking out with her then-boyfriend, guitarist Tosin Abasi (of Animals as Leaders). It’s also a direct confrontation with the industry’s racialized genre boxes — a phenomenon Kelela identifies as “sonic racism.”
“It’s designed to keep us apart, to keep us out,” she says, “and I think clocking that is really important.”
She points to the unspoken kinship that forms when Black fans who love heavier guitar music find each other in white-dominated crowds.
“When they meet it’s a different type of bond through the music — like ‘I’ve always felt on the outside,’ but also ‘We are so inside,’” she says. “That catharsis is another feeling and I knew so much of my audience had an experience with this music, but maybe had to compartmentalize and be on the outside in order to enjoy it.” With “New Avatar,” she wanted to “dismantle and disrupt” that dissonance without abandoning her R&B roots, she says.
That philosophy echoes through the record’s lyricism. Where 2023’s “Raven,” a rave-inspired, post-pandemic offering that ruminated on the times and being firm in your boundaries, “New Avatar” is its older sister who is a bit more wise and speaks with even sharper conviction.
“We need space to feel over it,” she says, “and to not be considered Debbie Downers. That’s basically the role that Black women have been sort of relegated to — to be truth tellers. Then everyone’s like ‘Ugh, come on…’ But it’s like we’re laughing all the time. I’m so happy. I’m not unhappy.”
She adds, “The key is not rooted in escapism. The key is rooted in being honest about what you saw, and that’s kind of the tradition that I’d want my work to live in.”
On “Point Blank,” Kelela explores the emotional labor for a woman in a one-sided relationship: “By now, I hope you see/That bullet set me free/And the more I pour, the more you reap/And I’m too spent too weep.” As the title implies, “Don’t Piss Me Off” sees a woman losing her patience with a lover: “Know you want me/Tell me I’m wrong/Takin’ all night/Don’t piss me off.” But by the album’s closer “If We Meet Again,” she cuts ties entirely: “If we ever amend/Nevermind, over and out.”
“A lot of the songs are like “Y’all ain’t s—,’” she says laughing, “But I try to say it in an artful way.”
Two bright spots on the album arrive in the final act: the dream pop-infused “New Life Forms” featuring Fousheé and “The Bridge,” a song about yearning with PinkPantheress, who returned the favor after Kelela appeared on her track “Bury Me.” Directed by Yasser Abubeker, “The Bridge” music video features a memorable, sultry dance number between the two singers — a sequence Kelela encouraged fans to learn before her shows.
“I cried the first time that Yasser sent me the edit,” she says. “It’s like a love letter to Black queer culture, our intimacy. It’s so sexy without me and her having an overt love interest. It just feels so implied in this smart way.”
The day before we met in Hollywood, Kelela gave an intimate live performance for Spotify. Backed by an all-Black femme band featuring a string quartet, guitar, bass and backup vocals, she performed “Idea 1” and a cover of Incubus’ “Mexico” — a rendition that earned her praise on social media from Incubus’ frontman, Brandon Boyd, himself.
“It’s a really important image,” says Kelela about the video. “In addition to it sounding exquisite, I’m not gonna lie, it also tore visually and symbolically.”
She’ll also be backed by a full band during her “New Avatar Live” tour, which she envisions as a high-energy rave that could break into a mosh pit at any moment.
“It’s another medium for me to be able to articulate or dismantle those constructs around what makes sense together,” Kelela says. “It’s going to be first and foremost — like any record or anything that I do — cathartic for me.”
She continues, “So I’m going to be living my best f— life and through that I know I will give a good show because it just excites me. It’s a dream come true to be able to pull these things together.”
The post ‘We need space to feel over it’: How Kelela became alt-music’s ultimate truth teller appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
