In some ways, Kelela has waited her whole life to make her new album. The 43-year-old artist is now widely hailed as a visionary who expertly and stylishly collapses the boundaries between R&B and electronic music – but when she was just starting out, she was an “indie girlie” who wrote her first song in a punk house. To “get the juices flowing” for her third record, ‘New Avatar’, she created a playful yet pointed playlist of early indie rock inspirations.
“I made this playlist called ‘White Bag’,” she tells NME. “I was like, I’m about to get in my white bag. And all my friends were like, Kelela.” She breaks into a peal of laughter.
Of course, the playlist’s title isn’t literal. With Kelela – with whom an album promo interview effortlessly becomes a multifaceted discussion about artistry, genre, consumption, racism and fandom – there are always layers. “Obviously, Black people invented so much of this music,” she says. “It’s not about the origins of the music, it’s about marketing. It’s about who was made to feel welcome, who was being centred, who was made to feel outside of.”
Growing up in a suburb of Maryland, Kelela Mizanekristos listened to her mother’s soul records and played violin. Around the time she was performing jazz standards in cafes, she was also hanging out in punk spaces, fronting an indie band called Dizzy Spells, and falling in love with indie favourites like The Fiery Furnaces and Metric.
“Emily Haines, you know what I mean?” she exclaims. “Those are some of the first feminist bops that I heard, like ‘Patriarch On A Vespa’. She’s such a good songwriter. Compositionally, I just loved their work.” The Fiery Furnaces, meanwhile, are one of her favourite bands of all time. “When you went to see them live, the arrangements would be flipped so hard,” she raves. “They would change the whole comp.”
For a younger Kelela, indie music was a source of revelation, but also alienation. Standing at a Fiery Furnaces show, she’d tear her eyes away from the Friedberger siblings only to find herself just one of two Black people in the crowd. (“And the other Black person was my friend Patrick, who put me onto the band.”)
“When we say ‘guitar’, the implications of that are pretty clear for a lot of people, but for me that’s like, 10 different sounds”
Her assessment of the homogenous indie landscape is bracing. “For any person of colour in that space, especially Black people, we were just eating shit so we could enjoy something,” she says. “There’s a certain amount of dissonance that we’re all having to swallow so that we could be like, ‘I love this song!’”
Her White Bag playlist, then, reflects both inspiration and isolation. “You had to build that taste yourself, because you weren’t being encouraged into it. You weren’t feeling so welcome.” Taking that playlist to producer and songwriter Oscar Scheller, her main collaborator on ‘New Avatar’, and explaining her indie past, Kelela was ready to reckon with that dynamic in her own deliberate way. She knew there’d be an appetite for the results, if the response to her playlist was any indication: anyone who heard it, whether Scheller or her amused friends, told her they were compiling White Bags of their own.
“I know this album will hit because everybody has their own experience with this,” she says. “It’s gonna resonate, because we’ve all had to do that. We’ve all had to put this to the side so we can be in the music.”
It can be easy to misunderstand ‘New Avatar’ in our current musical landscape, as obsessed as it is with discrete aesthetic ‘eras’ and mimetic ‘type beats’. Kelela was clear to Scheller: “It’s not me on top of, like, a simple indie rock moment.” As a producer and arranger, Kelela is “interested in intersections… I am building those types of tapestries where it’s neither here nor there.” And so she needed her new record to embody “a place between that we have not quite heard yet”.
Connecting with Scheller through her friend and collaborator LSDXOXO, she found a kindred spirit in the London producer, whose recent credits include PinkPantheress (who appears on sensual album standout ‘The Bridge’), Lily Allen, Shygirl and many more. Scheller was as keen to nail the synthesis of, say, Kurt Cobain and Aaliyah as she was: “We had such a ball naming the intersections.” They embraced a Linkin Park influence for ‘Linknb’, the album’s short and utterly sweet second single; when Kelela dropped her most recent single, ‘Outta Time’ – produced by and featuring A.K. Paul in a collaboration that dates back to the sessions for her 2017 debut album ‘Take Me Apart’ – she declared it her “Prince/Janet/D’Angelo/Nirvana bag activated”.
The slyly chameleonic guitar on ‘Outta Time’ – a low sensual growl that tiptoes into luminous melody – reflects ‘New Avatar’’s larger curiosity about the instrument’s range, and the omnivorous scope of the album’s influences, from soul to shoegaze to grunge. “When we say ‘guitar’, the implications of that are pretty clear for a lot of people, but for me that’s like, 10 different sounds,” Kelela agrees. “I almost felt overwhelmed by all the intersections that I wanted to find… There’s so many more tracks that were born, and we have so much more to explore.”
Not that Kelela has turned her back on the club. “I’m not into abandoning one thing so you can explore another,” she says firmly. “A third of the tracks are dance tracks, and I love that. I honestly cannot wait for remixes,” she adds, with feeling. “I’m so excited to hear what people make in response to this, because I know a lot of dance music producers have also had a guitar life.”
“I’m not into abandoning one thing so you can explore another”
The sleek, moody ‘New Avatar’ contends with what she calls “a city dweller’s darkness”. After her previous album, 2023’s ‘Raven’, Kelela was hoping to find a way out of the murk. “I thought ‘Raven’ was a little bit dark, muted. I was like, you want to be coming out of the darkness on your next album,” she says. “But it’s nothing bright about right now. In fact, it’s even more shitty. I feel like I have to be honest about that.” The album opens with ‘Idea 1’, which she’s said is about “the weight of being expected to witness, absorb, and speak truth at a time when the world feels like it’s unravelling”.
The frustration and anger that ‘New Avatar’ sublimates are both political and personal. “Romantic misogynoir is an endless resource of song. It’s a well,” she says, chuckling. There was no single heartbreak that inspired the album – rather, Kelela drew on a parade of disappointments from her life and others’, a myriad of different stories with similar patterns. It’s not that a lyric is particular, it’s that stunted men are predictable. “It’s like, it’s not about you, because all of you guys operate in the same, precise pattern of behaviour: an inability to self-regulate.”
Kelela crafts her lyrics in a process that foregrounds agency and accountability. “I’m looking for a certain type of responsibility in the messaging,” she says. “It needs to pass that test: nothing is happening to me. There’s things that I’m observing, and then there’s what I do about it.” That attitude informs the larger stance of ‘New Avatar’, too: its interiority shouldn’t be mistaken for escapism. Kelela hopes her music provides “solace or respite” from the horrors of real life: “Not forcing you to forget – more like a tool to help you get through it.”
As she prepares to release her new album, Kelela can’t help but reflect on how much she enjoyed making it. “I loved every second of it. It was so exhilarating and cathartic,” she says. She’s excited to play shows that could help heal “the alt Black kids who have had to do that compartmentalising and swallow that dissonance all these years” – and to dig deeper into the artistic intersections she’s always hunting for. “I feel like an explorer, an excavator,” she says. “I’m somebody who’s trying to find a new place for us to live. I’m trying to push it even further.”
Kelela’s ‘New Avatar’ is out on July 10 via Warp. Her ‘New Avatar Live’ tour of North America, Europe and the UK is on sale now.