There’s a moment, a little under a minute into the new album from R&B maverick Kelela, at which everything just comes together. It feels like a resolution, but surely it’s too early for that: we’ve only had fifty-eight seconds of relatively spare intro section up to this point. Perhaps, then, it’s not a resolution of something internal to the record itself, but an expression of some wider sense of relief.
The moment in question is the shift to the chorus of “idea 1,” taking the opening track of new avatar from downtempo meditation, all soft arpeggios and tastefully bendy synths, to space-age hymn, propelled by quicksilver guitars and skyscraping vocal harmonies. It’s a genuinely stunning move, its power augmented by the fact that a little over thirty seconds later, it all drops away, returning us to the solid ground of the second verse before whisking us upwards again before the track is out. The speed of movement and the smoothness of transition are a thing to behold.
It is this sense of movement and transition which has long animated the best of Kelela’s restless, genre-splicing work. Since she first emerged from L.A.’s buzzy alt-pop scene in the early 2010s, she’s been a pretty restless presence, making music that always feels like it’s going somewhere. Her work is all the more compelling for this dynamic quality, and new avatar retains it while gesturing back at the most powerful moments in her back catalog: see the way that the shivering breaks and pressurized bass of “point blank” recall both the grime-influenced grooves of debut mixtape Cut 4 Me and the clubbiest passages of 2023 album Raven without feeling like they’re covering old ground.
Likewise, there are shadows of 2017’s Take Me Apart on a track like “against me,” which features some of Kelela’s most spectacular vocal performances since that breakthrough record. Indeed, her instantly-identifiable vocal is often what holds her best work together, combining the classic R&B cocktail of staccato and melisma with graceful vibrato and conversational directness: perhaps the virtuosity and unpredictability of her singing is what prevents these gestures back in time from feeling nostalgic or repetitive.
All of this is to say that even against the backdrop of a genuinely exhilarating catalog, and partly because of the ways in which it refines and develops elements of that earlier work, new avatar might be Kelela’s most accomplished record yet. The adventurism and intellect that have made her music so exciting and unpredictable up to this point remain, but here they’re complemented by a sense of lightness and self-assurance that has not so much been absent on previous albums as only briefly tolerated. This record is wound less tightly: it swings, flutters and breathes in ways that feel new for Kelela.
Part of this may be credited to her admittance of those aforementioned older influences back into her music. The rock and shoegaze textures that dominated her formative years in the Washington D.C. indie scene prior to her move to L.A. making themselves felt at various points: see the circuitous flow of “goin down”; the delicate chimes of “retaliation lullaby”; the Cure-like two-minute drench of “linknb”; the reverberant snares of “crystalize.” A track like “don’t piss me off,” meanwhile, embraces the slippery low-end and slinky groove of UKG, elements which have burnt the edges of various Kelela records, most obviously Take Me Apart, but foregrounds them with greater confidence.
Her choice of guests might also have something to do with the record’s comparatively relaxed atmosphere: Fousheé’s breezy appearance on “new life forms” unlocks the track’s delicate momentum, while PinkPantheress lends a welcome touch of two-step precision to “the bridge” that affords Kelela the license to step back and gather herself. Perhaps the most laidback collaboration of all is AK Paul’s appearance on “outta time,” a lozenge-smooth slow jam replete with decadent lead guitar and Paul’s rich, syrupy vocal. These songs are still unmistakably Kelela—inventive, sincere, with every detail having been masterfully considered—but there’s more open space here. It suits her.
Perhaps this is what lies beneath the feeling of relief that accompanies the initial lift of “idea 1”: a sense that this most restless of musicians has arrived somewhere truly satisfying, not just to her enormous and dedicated fanbase (who need little further convincing of her genius) but to Kelela herself. new avatar is the sound of an artist with nothing left to prove; where she heads next is thrillingly unpredictable. For now, she’s given us one of the best pop albums of the year. [Warp]
Luke Cartledge is a journalist, researcher and musician. He lives in south-east London and writes about underground music, radical politics and cultural change. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, Tribune, The Quietus and many other publications, and he is a former editor at Loud And Quiet.
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