Kelela’s New Avatar Isn’t a Reinvention It’s a Homecoming
Ten years in the making, a dead Myspace page as evidence and a playlist called White Bag, Kelela's New Avatar is the sound of an artist finally letting every version of herself into the same room.
Kelela has never made an album that sounds exactly like the one before it, but New Avatar might be the most personal pivot yet. Out July 10 on Warp, the record trades some of the club haze that defined Raven for guitars, and not in a subtle way. Lead single “idea 1” opens with a wall of distorted strings and finds Kelela in icy white hair with bleached brows, a look that reads less like a costume change and more like a return to something she buried a long time ago.
Before Cut 4 Me, before the mixtapes that built her name in UK dance circles, Kelela sang in an indie band called Dizzy Spells. It barely exists online now, just a dead Myspace page left as evidence. New Avatar is the sound of her pulling that thread back out and weaving it into everything she’s built since. One track on the album, “outta time” with A.K. Paul, is proof of just how long she’s been sitting on this instinct. The two wrote it more than ten years ago, originally meant for Take Me Apart, before creative differences with a producer sent that album in another direction entirely. She kept the song anyway.
Talking to Vogue about the decade-long wait, Kelela didn’t frame it as a delay. She called it stamina. “I love that I waited till now because it does feel like the right record for it to live on, and it also feels like the right time,” she said, adding that the groundwork she’s laid as an artist means the song can land differently now than it would have a decade ago.
That patience runs through the whole project. Where Raven was about drawing lines, New Avatar pushes the same boundaries with more force behind them. Kelela described the shift to Vogue almost like a mood change, less pleading and more done asking. She put it simply: it’s not inviting anyone in anymore, it’s daring them to test it.
The features make sense once you hear the record. Fousheé and PinkPantheress both show up, and Kelela was clear that trust came before sound. She played Fousheé a batch of guitar-heavy tracks first, expecting her to gravitate there, only for Fousheé to pick the danciest song on the album instead and send her vocals back within twenty minutes. That kind of instinct, letting collaborators choose their own lane rather than assigning one, is part of why the record feels less like a solo statement and more like a conversation between artists who actually respect each other’s ear.
Even her prep work has a story behind it. Kelela built a playlist called “White Bag” while writing, pulling from Metric, Incubus’s Morning View, Buke and Gase, the Fiery Furnaces and Laura Marling, all touchstones from a more formative period in her life. She’s upfront about the racial subtext baked into that title, the way guitar music still gets coded and credited differently depending on who’s holding it. Her friends heard about the playlist and immediately started building their own versions.
Fashion is doing just as much storytelling on this era as the music. Kelela worked with creative director Yasser Abubeker to root the visual identity in New York specifically, not as a backdrop but as a mood board, sweatpants on a coffee run one day, a SoHo lunch look the next, a Chinatown stroll after that. She’s also continued her run with Maximillian Davis at Ferragamo, including the hooded orange look from her BRIC concert in Prospect Park, a moment she still brings up unprompted. It’s rare for an artist this focused on sound to talk about clothing with the same precision, but Kelela treats both as part of the same act of self-definition.
What makes New Avatar feel important right now isn’t just the sonic left turn. It’s the sense of an artist who has spent over a decade refusing to be filed under one genre finally proving that refusal was the whole point. She’s not chasing a rock moment or a nostalgia wave. She’s just letting every version of herself, the indie kid, the club vocalist, the R&B traditionalist, occupy the same record without asking permission from any of them.
Credits:
Images courtesy of Kelela
Words: Sebastian Kozak @seb_Kozak
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