The first thing you notice about Gelli Haha is that she’s dressed entirely in red. Top, trousers, bag, nail polish – Angel Abaya has worn everything in the one primary colour every day since 2023, when she created her playful dance-pop pseudonym.
“You should see my closet now,” laughs the monochrome maverick. “This isn’t some mask I’m putting on. I’m living this. I am committed to the bit. And it’s genuine. I’m not wearing red every day because I want attention – it’s that I’m invested in this world I’m building, and I want my art and life to represent each other.”
Make no mistake, Gelli Haha’s world – the Gelliverse – is joyously kaleidoscopic and bonkers. Her live shows are choreography-heavy spectacles, involving trampolines, pat-a-cake dances, inflatable dolphins and playground boxing matches being interrupted by bubble machines. Similarly, her recently released debut album ‘Switcheroo’ is equally inventive and quirky, hopscotching from the candy-floss electro of ‘Bounce House’ (the one-shot video to which resembles a Tumble Tots run by Devo) to the riotous hedonism of ‘Piss Artist’.
“Gelli Haha is a criminal you’d likely forgive and maybe befriend. Because she’s so cute, she gets a pass”
Speaking to NME from her home city of LA, ideas chaotically spill out of Abaya like candy from a piñata. Asked who Gelli is, the 27-year-old says she’s less an alter ego and more of a liberating philosophy. “This sounds woo-woo, but she’s my inner child,” she explains. “She’s this little girl that gets into mischievous situations. She’s a criminal you’d likely forgive and maybe befriend. Because she’s so cute, she gets a pass.”
As its title suggests, ‘Switcheroo’ is an exercise in reinvention; of experimenting with a persona, then realising, retrospectively, that it was your authentic self all along. In 2023, Abaya had reached an impasse. Having worked for eight years in various indie, folk and jazz bands in the Boise, Idaho music scene, the singer-songwriter had just moved to Los Angeles and released a heartfelt solo album ‘The Bubble’. Yet she was feeling unwelcome in her own life, as if her past was an ill-fitting outfit she’d grown out of. Teaming up with Sean Guerin from LA disco-revivalists De Lux, she wanted to think outside of the box.
She set herself some guiding principles for Gelli Haha: it had to be fun, non-serious and yes, entirely red. She was even inspired by Osho, the controversial philosopher from Netflix’s 2018 Wild Wild Country cult documentary, who posited that seriousness was a disease. Other touchstones included the immersive art of Marina Abramović, the slapstick of 1920s vaudeville, and the pop superstars she grew up idolising as a child like Britney Spears.
She tapped into her background as a co-director for a theatrical dance company that specialised in avant-garde productions, and delved into the history of “weird art-forward parties” in New York, like those held by Michael Alig’s outré Club Kids in the ’90s and James Murphy’s DFA collective in the noughties. “There was a larger-than-lifeness I wanted to live out in this performance,” she notes.
“This world feels ethereal and wacky, but it’s also real. That’s why it’s working”
Abaya is classically trained with a tendency towards meticulous overpreparation, and the first time she and Guerin worked together in the studio – on ‘Switcheroo’’s shimmering opener ‘Funny Music’, which draws vocally on her love of Kate Bush and Björk – she was reduced to tears when nothing was working. Listen to its lyrics, and you hear Abaya giving herself permission to make mistakes by voicing her anxieties as an existential inner-monologue (“It’s all a hoax/It’s just a joke”).
“That’s me still being blocked,” she says. “I was afraid to express what I felt. I’ve always felt in the studio that I should have some sort of answer. I cried a couple of times making ‘Funny Music’ because I’ve never been so exposed. I had a block of ‘I have to be right all the time – I can’t make mistakes’. But Gelli Haha is about getting over inhibitions. It’s supposed to be fun, play, and you don’t have to feel afraid to do it. And for this record, we weren’t afraid to experiment.”
Recorded using a variety of vintage synths and analogue effects, ‘Switcheroo’ plays in different sonic ballpits: ‘Funny Music’ ends abruptly with a Looney Tunes-style “BONK!” noise while the Italo disco of ‘Dynamite’ is interrupted by the sound of (what else?) a bear attack. On the breezy house of ‘Tiramisu’, she adopts the shrill vocals of a pouty Veruca Salt-esque child throwing a tantrum.
While tracks were scaffolded from instrumental demos Abaya had written, lyrics were frequently improvised in the studio. The noughties electroclash of ‘Spit’ lists words beginning with the letter S and peaks with the tongue-twister “Selby sells Shelby snails sans shells sick slick”. For ‘Normalize’, based on the 2005 Nigerian funk song ‘Nomalizo’ by Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu, she consulted an online dictionary and sang the first nine words she found that ended in ‘ia’ (including homophobia, haemophilia, and paedophilia) – before declaring that she wants to “fly away”.
“There’s always a meaning to the songs, even if it isn’t clear to me in the beginning,” she elaborates. “I feel like we’re playing in a sandbox, digging up fossils of meaning. With ‘Funny Music’, I didn’t set out to write a song about my personal journey of healing my fear of expression, but I ended up doing it in a fun way. ‘Normalize’ is about wanting to escape from the woes of the world.”
The newfound ability to cut loose is epitomised by the ribald ‘Piss Artist’. Guerin had the idea that she should try recording a track drunk. However, necking a bottle of tequila, all Abaya wanted to do was talk. Over a louche electro track that could have been off the Party Monster soundtrack, she comically slurs a spoken-word tale like your mate phoning you from the afters. “It’s a true story that happened eight years ago where I convinced everyone to take their shirts off at a party and I pissed in a jar in front of my friends and didn’t care,” she says. “I just feel that’s so on-brand for Gelli.”
Abaya played her first Gelli Haha gig in August last year and is swiftly earning a reputation for the most fun live show around. But she wants to further break down the barriers between audience and performer. “I created Gelli as a world that I could feel 100 per cent free to express and do whatever I wanted. And I want to make it a world that other people can play in,” she reflects. The show and videos chart a narrative: that her dancers are scientists hunting her down, before melding with her as the “parachute monster” shown in the ‘Normalize’ video. The scientists represent the hardened adults; Gelli her fearless inner child.
“I like that this world feels ethereal and wacky, but it’s also real. That’s why it’s working,” she says. “It’s not a gimmick. I’ve based this all on a belief system and practice I stand by. Sometimes dance and pop music can feel cold – but there’s a heart to this.”
Gelli Haha’s ‘Switcheroo’ is out now via Innovative Leisure