Kelela’s new album makes genre feel like a failure of language. The closer you get to describing what new avatar is doing, the more inadequate labels become. Not because the music is abstract or unknowable, but because the categories themselves stop making sense. Kelela doesn’t blur boundaries so much as reveal they were never as solid as we imagined. The album isn’t driven by novelty for its own sake, or the thrill of collision.
Every distortion, every industrial pulse, every blurred guitar line is moved by the same quiet tenderness. Even at its most abrasive, new avatar never sounds interested in confrontation for its own sake. Beneath all the friction is an unmistakable softness, as though Kelela is searching for intimacy in places where language (and genre) have never been able to keep up. The intimacy survives long after genre has stopped being useful.
She’s been studying, expanding on, and navigating that holy quality of feeling for over a decade. “Tenderness is something I really want to pursue, just a soft, tender place that I want to love from. It makes me cry,” she said in an old interview when discussing influential neo-soul artists like Faith Evans and Anita Baker.
In that same interview, she mentioned the power of falling love. “I want it to be able to happen over and over and over again without all of us feeling so worn-down and jaded.” Now, as it nears a decade since the release of her debut album Take Me Apart, she’s having a chilling conversation with her past self, circling the emotions she was cautious against. “Bearing your cross, it’s your loss, now I’m jaded,” she sings on the opening track. Guitars grow like wildfire around her. Devastation, decay, and scorched earth are where she begins. That early exploratory optimism doesn’t disappear or turn sour here. It returns weathered and, at some points, emboldened.
new avatar thrives on elegant abrasion. The guitars are some of the record’s most exciting textures, rubbing against Kelela’s voice instead of simply supporting it. Sometimes it’s scratchy, fuzzy like steel wool (“idea 1”); at others, it’s like wind picking up dust from a construction site (“goin down”). While Kelela’s overall sound has always been fluid, her voice has always been grounding in its deep honey tones and feathery swiftness. Her voice still glides and pivots, but the contrast of industrial beats and melancholic guitars heightens the tension in these songs. Take the dramatic stunner “goin down,” where her voice echoes lonely against reverby guitars and misty drumbeats. It’s haunting and doom-ridden like a Burial track.
The closer “if we meet again,” my personal favorite, sums up the album’s fascination with blurred lines. It’s hard to tell whether you’re hearing a processed guitar or a synthesizer. The melody spins in circles like a melancholy merry-go-round, suspended somewhere between organic and synthetic, familiar and uncanny. Kelela isn’t interested in resolving those ambiguities; she lets them become the music’s emotional core.
new avatar reminds me how frustratingly genre labels can reduce art to a gimmick. It’s this psychological paradox where “genre-fluid” as a descriptor feels lazy, maybe even offensive; a label that acknowledges complexity without actually describing it. Kelela has always collapsed the boundaries between her R&B style vocals, electronic music, pop, and hip-hop. She continues that vocation on her latest album, but there’s a lot more electric guitar, pulling influence from Incubus, Linkin Park, and Janis Joplin. But it would be stupid to flatly label new avatar as a “rock” album. R&B has always been rock.
Yes, this is another thesis on how the origins of popular music is Black. Rock’s DNA is Black music. Treating distorted guitars as the dividing line between R&B and rock mistakes instrumentation for history. Every arrangement on new avatar feels like it has been worked until the seams disappear, leaving behind music that doesn’t announce its influences so much as absorb them into an entirely new language.
That makes sense given Oscar Scheller’s role as Kelela’s principal collaborator. The producer has one foot in indie music, but Kelela has been adamant that new avatar wouldn’t amount to her singing over indie-rock instrumentals. Instead, she wanted to build “intersections” music that exists in a place “where it’s neither here nor there.” That’s exactly what these songs do. They’re too jagged to settle into R&B, too fluid to become rock, too emotionally elastic to stay inside electronic music.
Another standout, “don’t piss me off,” captures that balancing act perfectly. It’s quietly menacing, driven by a smoky aggression that never boils over. Kelela barely raises her voice, but she doesn’t have to. The threat comes from how controlled she sounds; the restraint is what gives the song its bite.
One of the smartest things about new avatar is that its feature are powerfully placed. It’s a subtle sequencing choice, but it changes the way the record unfolds. Instead of introducing collaborators as a selling point, Kelela spends the first stretch establishing the album’s own gravitational pull. By the time other voices arrive, they’ve entered her world, not the other way around. The lightest moments on new avatar are when she collaborates with two young Black artists that have navigated dissolving genre, following a path that Kelela has cleared for them.
“new life forms” is a dappled synth-pop, trip-hop hybrid. Kelela and Fousheé make the perfect soundtrack for shrooms in the park and playful flirting. Similarly, on the “the bridge,” Kelela and PinkPantheress reach for a celestial euphoria that feels unburdened and free. These collabs are rejuvenating moments before the stunning closer where Kelela accepts bitter truths: “I don’t wanna hear that I’m the best you’ve found/ When nobody else is around.” It might not be a happily ever after, but Kelela chooses herself without romanticizing the end: “You could hear this song but you’ll never see/ All the ways you were killin’ me.” It might be the album’s most understated track, but I obsessively keep coming back to it, magnetized the composed profoundness of her acceptance and hurt.
What ultimately holds the album together is Kelela’s sense of responsibility. “Nothing is happening to me,” she said. “There’s things that I’m observing, and then there’s what I do about it.” That perspective transforms new avatar from a collection of moods into an ethic. Kelela isn’t interested in documenting chaos so much as deciding how to respond to it. That’s why the album’s tenderness feels so hard-won. It isn’t innocence or optimism, but a choice. It survives distortion, grief, and uncertainty without pretending they’ve disappeared. In Kelela’s hands, tenderness isn’t the opposite of abrasion. It’s what gives the abrasion its meaning.
new avatar is out 7/10 on Warp.
Other albums of note this week:
• The Rolling Stones’ Foreign Tongues
• Jack White’s Frozen Charlotte
• Panda Bear & Sonic Boom’s A ? Of WHEN
• Future’s The Real Me
• Show Me The Body’s Alone Together
• Ultra Lights’ Pleasure’s All Yours
• Twisted Teens’ Florida Water Blues
• Allison Russell’s In The Hour Of Chaos
• MOULD’s Hoping As A Coping Mechanism
• Hew’s Your Version
• Hurry’s Zoned Out
• Finn Wolfhard’s Fire From The Hip
• Magi Merlin’s Power House
• The Menzingers’s Everything I Ever Saw
• Will Sheff’s Extra Mile
• Ebbb’s Shallow Hits
• Gloorp’s Gloorp Life
• Coco Smith’s You Won’t Get My Message But You’ll Hear It
• Tracey Nelson’s Hercules
• TENGGER’s SKY
• Xiu Xiu’s Eraserhead Xiu Xiu
• No Cure’s It Is Going To Get Dark
• Holy Wave’s i’m DADA
• Eartheater’s Heavenly Body: If I’m The Bottle You’re The Message
• sundayclub’s sundayclub
• YEONJUN’s NO LABELS: PART 02
• Fathers’ Fathers
• Snag’s All The Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn To Dust
• Compandas’ Tropical Finasteride
• Joe James’ The Ends, Never Ends
• Pain Gain’s Pain Gain
• Yelawolf’s 45
• Chuck Strangers’ Glory Of The King’s Hand
• foamboy’s STUPID HOT
• Bethany Wohrle’s Reason That I Sing
• Quiet Husband’s THE ARCHITECTURE OF PERCEPTION
• Marcus Charles’ [Spirit]
• Eva Under Fire’s Villainous
• Prateek Kuhad’s Full Moon Chamber
• The Garden’s Bootleg
• Daydream Plus’ Second Last Day Of Summer
• i-dle’s We Mini Album
• La Reezy’s Skiddle Bandana
• Adam Lambert’s Adam
• The Head And The Heart’s The Head And The Heart (Live At Neumos)
• DEVILDRIVER’s Strike And Kill
• 2K88 & Lauren Duffus & Rainy Miller & Bianca Scout’s Everything Always Changes, For We’re Truly Here
• Baby Smith’s Lately, Love Is Dead
• Luluc’s Sweet Thief
• JORDY’s In Retrospect
• Biribá Union’s Passing Go
• Jacob Brodovsky’s Tell The Kids We Tried
• Jesus Is The Path To Heaven’s power !
• Park Hills Circle’s All Of A Sudden
• Michael Cloud Duguay’s Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go
• hackedepicciotto’s LICHTUNG
• Michael Brook’s Cobalt Blue / Live At The Aquarium
• Suki Waterhouse’s Loveland
• The Temper Trap’s Sungazer
• Girl Trouble’s As Is
• Piu’s Milao
• Houndmouth’s Lordy
• Jaco Jaco’s On The Levee
• MAQUINA.’s BODY TRANSMISSION
• Jack Grisham And The Life Undone’s Jack Grisham And The Life Undone
• Bring Me The Horizon’s Count Your Blessings | Repented
• Baby Jane’s Winter Forever
• Compandas’ Tropical Finasteride
• wave to earth’s bad pieces
• Judah Weston & IsoKeys’ Why So Much Hate
• The-Dream’s Love/Hate 2
• Nick Kivlen’s Addicted To The Sunset
• Bella Kay’s My Reckless Abandon
• Sango’s RHYTHM & MELODY
• Mo Troper’s Today I Played My Guitar And Sang
• Suede’s Antidepressants: Expanded
• Dux Content’s Lifestyle (Deluxe Reissue)
• My Chemical Romance’s Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys (Deluxe)
• Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85 (Deluxe Edition)
• Wet Leg’s Moisturizer (Deluxe)
• Jacob Collier’s In My Room (10 Year Anniversary Edition)
• little image’s KILL THE GHOST (Deluxe)
• she’s green’s Swallowtail EP
• Frost Children’s Tweaker EP
• Pamela’s It’s Nice To See You Here EP’
• Mouth Ulcers’ Silent Pictures EP
• Ronboy’s Get Rich EP
• MASKS’ First Life EP
• Cutscene’s A Piece Of Life EP
• Myth Math’s Tongues EP
• Leah Nawy’s I Could Bloom From Here EP
• Welcome Strawberry’s “desperate flower” remixes EP
• Maya Engen’s Just My Luck EP
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
