Kelela says her album New Avatar is built to take apart sonic racism

Kelela's third album, New Avatar, is dark, guitar-heavy and deliberately hard to file, and she says that is the point. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, the singer described the record as an attempt to take apart what she calls sonic racism: the racialized genre boxes the industry sorts artists into. "It's designed to keep us apart, to keep us out," she said, and noting that is the first step in dismantling it.

She is specific about who that separation hurts. She points to the recognition that passes between Black fans who love heavy guitar music when they find each other in white-dominated crowds, an experience she describes as feeling permanently on the outside while knowing you are deeply inside the music. New Avatar is an attempt to close that gap without giving up her R&B roots to do it.

The move back toward guitars is a return rather than a departure. Before her solo career she fronted an indie rock band called Dizzy Spells and played alongside her then-boyfriend, the guitarist Tosin Abasi of Animals as Leaders. When she sat down with the producer Oscar Scheller she played him what she calls her white bag playlist: the indie, rock and alternative records she loved as a teenager, Incubus, Deftones and the Red Hot Chili Peppers among them.

Scheller, who has made tracks for PinkPantheress and Lily Allen, produced almost the entire album at his home studio in Silver Lake. Their first session produced two songs, the lead single idea 1 and the U.K. garage-inflected Don't Piss Me Off. She also played him Outta Time, a track with the British singer-producer A.K. Paul that she had been holding on to for a decade, waiting until she was ready to make a guitar record.

That ease shows in the schedule. New Avatar runs twelve tracks and arrives three years after Raven, a faster turnaround than she has managed before. She describes Raven as a post-pandemic, rave-inspired record about holding boundaries; New Avatar, by her account, is the older sister of it, wiser and blunter.

Around the music is a whole built world. She has framed the album in an apocalyptic visual universe with Gotham as its shorthand, from the colour-inverted cover art to the icy white hair and bleached brows in the video for idea 1, a song that draws on Octavia Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. The reference is basic, she admits, but it fits a record about people needing rescue in a world that is broadly wrecked and still not hopeless.

The writing is sharper than the world-building suggests. Point Blank works through the emotional labour of a one-sided relationship, Don't Piss Me Off is a woman running out of patience with a lover, and the closer, If We Meet Again, cuts the tie altogether. Two songs late in the record open the mood out: New Life Forms with Foushee, and The Bridge with PinkPantheress, who returned a favour after Kelela guested on her track Bury Me. The video for The Bridge, directed by Yasser Abubeker, builds to a dance sequence Kelela has been encouraging fans to learn before her shows.

Live, she is backed by a full band and describes the New Avatar tour as a high-energy rave that could tip into a mosh pit at any moment. The day before the interview she played a session for Spotify with an all-Black femme band and a string quartet, performing idea 1 and a cover of Incubus' Mexico that drew public praise from that band's own frontman, Brandon Boyd. More from this end of the map is on the R&B and soul hub and the electronic hub.