What happens when one of experimental R&B’s most compelling voices makes a guitar album? With Kelela, the answer is not a break with genre, but an expansion. Since her debut Take Me Apart, the US singer has combined virtuosic vocal runs with futuristic electronic designs – while remaining consistently difficult to classify. On New Avatar, she now expands this coordinate system to include shoegaze aesthetics and alternative-rock references.
It is a development that comes as less of a surprise when one considers Kelela’s musical background: before she became known for experimental R&B, she moved through Washington, D.C.’s indie and punk scene. What is more interesting is how naturally these elements flow into her current sound. The best example is »goin down«, which combines distorted guitar planes with her familiar velvet R&B vocals. Anyone who, back then, could never decide between Aaliyah and Nirvana while trying to work out who they were may finally find peace here.
At the same time, her affinity for club music remains intact: »don’t piss me off« works with drum’n’bass rhythms, while »the bridge« carries garage into dream-pop spheres. Yet New Avatar understands itself less as an excursion into foreign genres than as a reminder that these dividing lines are artificial anyway – and that R&B as a genre is notoriously underestimated, as the artist herself recently claimed in an interview. In that sense, New Avatar remains unmistakably Kelela: futuristic, queer-feminist and deeply rooted in Black music history.
