‘We can find renewal despite the bullshit we deal with as black women’: Kelela on Stan’s armies and speaking up for Gaza | Kilila

MMore than most musicians in a typical promotional cycle, Kelela has been popping up on my social feeds in increasingly surreal sets. In one clip, she blows kisses to a huge crowd of onlookers in the streets of SoHo, New York; Another saw her posing for fans against a fog-filled background somewhere between the video game South Central and the survival game Silent Hill. In the Clue 1 video, the singer walks down a hallway with windswept silver hair, looking like Storm if the X-Men movies were directed by Hype Williams. In a viral tribute/parody, the track is bizarrely synced to a clip of ’90s RuPaul strutting her stuff over the song’s throbbing guitar, while wearing a remarkably similar sleek platinum blonde wig.

“If there was a competition between artists, I feel like I would win,” the actual Kelela told me when we met at a recording studio in East Williamsburg, New York. “There is no one’s shadow!

“But like humor and reading co-exist in my audience in a way that I never could have written.” Today she wears a graphic mesh top, her hair styled with small bangs, and a set of acrylic glass nails, which look neat folded in her lap as if she’s rolling a joint. Who is she today? “I’m like an angry teenager,” she said slyly before rolling her eyes and crossing her middle fingers. “I’m like…”Damn everything“.”

Even if she’s too cold to completely sell this naughty fantasy, there’s still plenty of realistic challenge for Kelela. Since her mixtape Cut 4 Me in 2013, the musician has steadily expanded her profile and honed her sense of purpose. The counterpoint to the exaggerated enthusiasm of social media is her iron certainty as an artist, which becomes more apparent the more diverse her work becomes. In addition to a sold-out tour and high-profile collaborations with Solange, Danny Brown and Gorillaz, Kelela has for a decade remained a major influence on young musicians seeking to fuse pop music with regional club beats.

“I think her unwavering talent for pushing the boundaries of music and continuing to dive into the more experimental aspects of electronic sounds often pushes me to think outside the box when producing my own songs,” PinkPantheress, who is featured on Kelela’s new single The Bridge, says in an email. “Her work has easily expanded the market and opened doors for other black female pop and electronic artists. I truly believe that thanks to her we have more room to experiment and not adhere to the status quo.”

In a way, the title of Kelela’s third album, New Avatar, Perfect fit and a little on the nose. With each new release, the singer used all the tools at her disposal to not only develop a new persona but also present a broad, unified sense of self. Her ever-changing look has always complemented an ever-escalating musical sensibility – one set to scorching grime, chill vibes and raucous club music while remaining firmly rooted in R&B. The latest iteration of her ever-changing sound is one of her least anticipated and most successful to date: silky, hook-laden vocals filtered through shoegaze reverbs and breezy rock riffs. Surprisingly, this renewal seems even more impressive now that the singer’s increasing viral releases have brought countless new listeners towards her work.

Although she is probably best known for her explorations of R&B and electronic music, Kelela first made forays into music through indie rock. While living in Washington, D.C., she played in the band Dizzy Spells, and remained with the group long enough to record (and cancel) an EP. “It was the first time I was involved in songwriting and felt free and liberated enough to kind of have fun,” she says. Jamming with her then-partner, Tosin Abbasi, lead guitarist of the progressive metal band Animals as Leaders, also helped influence her style of music. “He was writing jazzy proggy music with weird time signatures with really left-of-center harmonics,” she explained, “and I really fell in love with trying to find my way in this seemingly unkind sonic landscape.”

Surprisingly, the singer has been enjoying the concept of a guitar-driven album for a long time, even though it didn’t seem quite right at the moment. You can get subtle hints of what’s to come from some of her live arrangements made for her 2024 shows at New York’s Blue Note jazz club — in one standout clip from her 2019 mixtape Aquaphoria, she set her vocals to a blues solo by Jaco Pastorius. After releasing her debut studio album Take Me Apart in 2017, Kelela Raven’s following has developed over a long period of time, hampered by “rust” which the singer attributes to white supremacy and capitalism. To examine those who joined this project, she compiled a curriculum of books and films for her collaborators to capture how she wanted to reconcile personal expression with other kinds of isolation and broader social oppression. “I never made Raven a fetch [record]The singer reflects, “It was for people who were already here… It was more subtle, there weren’t a lot of big singles.”

By contrast, the new Avatar movie seems to have been made on the far other side of that rust, from a place of far greater ambition and self-confidence. After engaging an impressive group of dance artists to help launch her early releases, Kelela appears to have hit her stride with a group of key collaborators uniquely suited to help realize her ambitions. A number of long-term relationships, such as producers Oscar Schiller and Asma Marouf, as well as a creative team including art director Misha Notcott and illustrator Janeva Ellis, formed a reliable nucleus to launch her vision. But it also seems to offer a funny perspective and productive tension to keep its ideas flowing freely and conceptually coherent.

To prepare for the album, Kelela drew from what she describes as her “white bag” playlist, a list of music she says was previously sold to her as white music that she absolutely loved. Then a continuous period of jamming and experimenting to settle on the recording’s sound palette, aiming for an ideal ratio of “two-thirds guitar, one-third dance music.” The interaction between these species is incredibly dynamic. The looping guitar and drum machine on Linknb achieve such incredible momentum that when the beat gradually starts sharing airtime with back-and-forth samples by Memphis rappers La Chat and Gimisum Family, it’s completely seamless. So close to If We Meet Again, the smoldering musical progression eerily reminiscent of guitar sounds like the dying echo of an already faded relationship.

As an arts writer, I was very interested in the role Janeva Ellis played in shaping the record. The painter’s work often features black figures with withering features crossing surreal landscapes filled with doom as if poisoned by their real-time surroundings. On Idea 1, one of two tracks on which the duo share songwriting duties, the pair draw inspiration from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel The Parable of the Sower to conjure a disintegrating relationship against a world on fire, which Kelela inhabits due to crushing shoegaze guitar as her agonizing screams bleed into the echo.

“It shows what kind of reading of the world we live in and have to navigate, it’s the background to what I write about,” Kilela said. I stopped. “Our ethics mess it up. We want to challenge the existing systems that make us suffer, so it’s like our humanity is preserved, that we can find renewal all the time, that we have to continue to live in this world with all the bullshit that we have to navigate as black women.”

But the sensation that excites both women can be very funny, and Ellis’ role as friend and interlocutor, an authoritative presence who can make the other laugh, is also valuable for keeping the humor and humanity in perspective. One of the funniest moments on the record occurs in the bridge in the second half of new song Point Blank. As the song’s competing strings begin to vibrate and bounce like gunfire, Kelela’s state of siege briefly allows her to once again succumb to her partner’s charms: “But catch me in the dark, baby/Can you trick me/I’m taking what I want, baby/But you can’t stay—don’t start.”

She’s just as frank everywhere else. Last year, Kelela joined more than 400 artists in pulling their music from Israeli streaming services as part of the “No Music for Genocide” campaign. On a more regular basis, she’s unwavering about centering a black feminist vision, right down to centering fans of color and cutting collaborations on the album with an artist who didn’t share her values. Did she miss out on opportunities because she wasn’t afraid to take a stand? She says: “Yes.” She says she photographed the brand partnership before the company changed its mind after she spoke out. “After you said something, actually, don’t worry about it.” When pressed, it won’t say who it is. “I didn’t even have to pay the money back,” she says. “They were like, ‘We don’t want to mess with [bottom] line”

“The intersections that I have to deal with actually provide me with more mental fortitude, stability and clarity about what’s going on,” Kelela explains. “I feel like part of my talent is my ability to focus on an accurate reality… I think poetry comes from what I say, and how specific I am with feelings.”

Even as her profile grows larger, and her image spreads more widely than ever, it is the nuanced emotions at the heart of Kelela’s project and her critical, experience-trained eye that makes her so interesting and adaptable. Given the accuracy, would it be tempting to push the big red button and go for a massive kind of fame? “At first this was like what I thought I was doing,” she says, “but then I said, ‘Oh, I think I actually want to make avant-garde music.’” That’s more important to me than getting numbers on the board and having the biggest career, because that’s actually the delicious thing, that’s the exciting thing.