Kelela's 'new avatar' is a Jagged, Tender Triumph of Distorted Alt-R&B
Six years on from her last full-length, Kelela returns on Warp with new avatar, and she’s brought the guitars. This is a record of “elegant abrasion” — industrial elements and distorted, guitar-forward arrangements grinding against a voice that has always sounded like liquid mercury. The result sits, gloriously, in the in-between: too jagged to settle into R&B, too fluid to become rock. It’s the most physical music she’s ever made, and somehow the most intimate.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Producer Oscar Scheller builds the album on textures that range from scratchy and fuzzed-out to the dust-like rumble of construction sites. The low-end is deliberately unstable, a shifting floor that makes Kelela’s poise up top feel hard-won.
The Spatial Dynamics: Scheller’s genius here is the intersection — the mix keeps finding places where a sound could be “processed guitar or synthesizer,” where the music exists “neither here nor there.” That ambiguity is the point: everything blurs, and Kelela cuts through it clean.
Standout Performance
Everything pivots on Kelela’s restraint. On the “quietly menacing” don’t piss me off, it’s the control that gives the song its bite — she never raises her voice because she never has to. Guest turns from Fousheé and PinkPantheress land as rejuvenating bursts of color.
Why It’s Certified
Reinvention this drastic usually costs an artist their center, and Kelela loses none of hers. “goin down” broods and doom-lights the album’s weather. “if we meet again” spins processed guitar and synth into a melancholy merry-go-round, the record’s aching centerpiece. “don’t piss me off” wields menace at a whisper, all the more cutting for how quietly it’s delivered. Singers, study how she keeps her poise on a floor that’s deliberately shifting under her. She dragged that liquid-mercury voice through the fuzz and came out the far side with the tenderness intact. Certified great.