Kelela: Fear The Future
Having become renowned as one of music’s most cutting-edge but fluid visionaries for well over a decade, on her dystopia-fuelled third album ‘new avatar’, Kelela is both returning to her roots, and looking firmly ahead.
Few artists have reshaped the boundaries of contemporary R&B as quietly, and as profoundly, as Kelela Mizanekristos. Over the past 13 years, the second-generation Ethiopian-American singer has built a body of work that defies easy categorisation, moving effortlessly between underground club music and ambient pop, intimate songwriting and experimental electronics, while teaming up with visionaries as diverse as Arca, Solange and PinkPantheress.
Three albums in, she’s far from done experimenting. Latest LP ‘new avatar’ sees her redefining the parameters of “guitar music”, adding grunge and shoegaze textures to a hypnotic collection roughly divided between minimalist dream-pop, sinuous slow jams and claustrophobic club cuts. It’s a full circle moment for an artist who spent her youth studiously ignoring racially-coded genre boundaries, taking in “jazz vocal, musicals and world music” alongside alt-rock, R&B, Go-Go music and Baltimore club.
In today’s post-genre world, it feels wild to imagine that listening widely was once deemed a quietly radical act. And yet, growing up in the ‘90s, pre-Internet, Kelela’s diverse musical diet made her something of an outlier.
“Back then music was really segregated,” she impresses, dialling in from her apartment on New York’s Lower East Side. “We didn’t have syndicated pop radio in the same way it exists now, so there was “white music” and there was “black music”. And growing up in suburban Maryland, it meant I was around a lot of white kids listening to a lot of alternative music.”
This tribalism also played out in hers and her peers’ fashion choices. “There was just a lot more cultural autonomy back then, so the jeans that black girls wore were these two Italian brands – Parasuco and Sergio Valente. And on the other side of the lunchroom, the white kids were wearing Vans with preppy clothes. So I would pair an Abercrombie or an American Eagle shirt with Parasucos and Vans and people would [think]: ‘What is going on?’”
As much as Kelela wore her broad tastes as a badge of honour, she admits it could often feel isolating to be caught between two worlds. “I think any person of colour doing that is going to feel some sense of loneliness. But did it overwhelm me? No.” In fact, she doubled down, dedicating her spare time to trawling Napster for nascent UK Garage, tuning into soul and R&B radio and singing back up for local jazz vocalists.
It was at college that she joined her first band, after contacting Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano on MySpace to seek songwriting advice. “She said ‘just get together with your friends and jam,’ so that’s what I did.” Working alongside a friend named Tim George, they formed the Metric-inspired Dizzy Spells, playing a handful of shows in local DIY punk venues before ultimately disbanding. It would take almost two decades for her to revisit these indie-rock roots on an album that she sums up as “new avatar: same Kelela”.
So why go there now? “Guitar is one of my favourite instruments, and there are so many sounds within it that I thought I would love to express that,” she shrugs. Early reference points included ‘Hejira’-era Joni Mitchell and “quiet grunge music”, but it was teaming up with her co-producer Oscar Scheller that really shaped the sound of ‘new avatar’.
Scheller was originally recommended to Kelela by Berlin-based techno artist LSDXOXO, and she was already a fan of his work with PinkPantheress and Shygirl. So when she walked into his studio and was confronted with “a wall of guitars” she was pleasantly taken aback. “He said, ‘I’m an indie-boy, babe – if you want to go there, we can go there,’” she laughs, adopting her best British accent. The synergy was undeniable so they began collaborating, working with a playlist of references playfully referred to as “white bag”.
Defining the premise of the playlist, she explains: “It’s less about the origins of the music and whether it’s culturally white or not. It’s more about how it was marketed to us. This is the music that, if I went to the show, I can guarantee that I’m going to be one of four black people there.” Artists added included Laura Marling, Glasser, Buke & Gase and Incubus, along with Kelela’s long-time favourites Metric.
The fact ‘new avatar’ is arriving three years on from its predecessor, the club-focused ‘Raven’ – which arrived a full six years after her full-length debut ‘Take Me Apart’ – speaks volumes about the ease with which the collection was created. “For some people three years is really long, but I’ve never made a record this quickly. And I’ve been able to do that because [apart from ‘outta time’ with A.K. Paul] I was working with one producer so a lot of the steps in my process before were basically eliminated.”
Equally, the delay behind ‘Raven’ ran much deeper than just the creative process, with Kelela taking a break in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests. “It was crazy because I’d already written all the songs and, the way they sound, a lot of people thought I wrote them after the uprising. And it’s like, no, I actually wrote those songs because I was pissed off before all that, and then when [the murder of Trayvon Martin] happened I thought, ‘you know what, I am taking a pause’.”
Similarly, she admits to experiencing some writer’s block before writing ‘new avatar’’s lead single ‘linknb’. “That was right when Trump got elected. Between that and reading Octavia Butler’s [post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel] ‘Parable of the Sower’, it felt like the world was starting to close in. But that book really made it easier for me to articulate what I was experiencing. It was affirming.”
‘linknb’ is a blast of Cure-esque atmospherics hewn from glowering guitar, programmed drums and hip hop vocal samples buried deep in the mix, and sees her coo, “It’s not hard to be brave / Easier to give too much away / All I know is that I paved the way / Underpaid.” Indeed, for Kelela, using her platform to speak honestly is a non-negotiable facet of her songwriting.
“I like to think about courage instead of fearlessness,” she muses. “I’m definitely not a person who’s fearless, but I’m feeling the fear and doing it anyway. As a black woman, there are less outs because you’re dealing with intersectional oppression. Misogynoir shows up in so many ways that I can’t get around not having integrity.”
The shoegaze-infused ‘idea 1’ develops this theme, in a chorus built around the refrain, “Bearing your cross, it’s your loss, now I’m jaded.” ‘point blank’ transfers this burden to a romantic relationship, as Kelela questions the emotional labour expected of her as a woman: “And the more I pour, the more you reap / Got me working while you’re fast asleep”.
Equally, there are moments of bliss here, most notably on transcendent PinkPantheress link-up ‘the bridge’. Having guested on ‘Bury Me’ from the UK producer’s debut proper ‘Heaven Knows’, Kelela had no hesitation asking for Pink to repay the favour. “Collaborating with her just feels so natural, and synergistic,” she gushes. “She’s an extremely sweet person. She was like, ‘I gotta do a good job for Mother.’” Certainly, hearing their voices blend seamlessly over a bubbling two-step rhythm and Burial-esque synths, there seems to be a real kinship between the two artists, despite the two-decade age gap.
Quite rightly, Kelela views the life experience she’s amassed as a real boon for her artistry. “I didn’t write my first song until I was 27 and I didn’t release anything until I was 30, so I got to do all my experimenting, fucking up and game playing in my 20s. Having to fuck up in front of everybody in the way that one does when they’re in their 20s – that would be so brutal. And it’s definitely shaped how I’ve approached my career, because had I found success at 20, I probably would have had less integrity and would have fucked it.”
As it is, today she hopes this latest chapter of her career opens up important conversations in the culture. “I want this record to illuminate the idea of sonic racism, and also gendered oppression. I am speaking a lot to patriarchal behaviour, and I want to facilitate a discussion about the state of the world. But I also want the music to play an indirect support role, offering relief for – and emboldening – the people who have to go out there every day, and do the work.”
Is the fact she remains so enmeshed with the world around her perhaps partially symptomatic of her slow ascent as an artist? “Definitely,” she agrees. “I don’t feel so removed from real shit, or insulated by being perceived and visible, because I have spent so much of my adult life not being ‘Kelela’. I have equal experience being somebody who was really striving for something, as I do somebody who actually manifested and is living a life she dreamed of.”
That manifesting continues apace: as well as the remix package she has planned for ‘new avatar’, she alludes to a number of other projects in the pipeline, though is resolutely tight-lipped on details. “I thought it would be all over at 35 but it’s really cool to still be here,” she smiles. “And I have so much more to say. Honestly, I can’t stop.”
‘new avatar’ is out now via Warp.
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