Kelela runs a strict program. “Proudly,” she says, saluting herself over Zoom, blunt in hand, smoke curling through her Brooklyn kitchen like incense. Since her debut, she has remained unwavering in her Black queer feminist-centered politics. At her shows, she asks audiences to leave the front rows for Black queer fans. Prior to her sophomore album Raven, she took stock of the people she surrounded herself with and cut ties with anyone who didn’t get with the program, including her label, Sony, and her management, IMG.
Recently, she scrapped a collaboration intended for her apocalyptic new album New Avatar because, in her words, “sometimes, niggas just don’t know how to act.” That refusal to compromise is the animating force behind New Avatar. The album arrives just three years after Raven. It’s the shortest gap between LPs in her career—with sociopolitical instability, climate catastrophe, and deepening global division defining the present moment, she felt compelled to speak to the times.
It took Kelela a few hard-won battles to attain her devil-may-care disposition. “There are so many consequences when you’re younger, consequences related to challenging these systems. It usually equals you’re going to have to suffer socially or monetarily,” she says. Black women know this phenomenon all too well. Through trial and error, Kelela realized a no-nonsense approach to disrespect was the only way to survive with her dignity and sanity intact.
“I’ve eaten shit, and I have rubbed my own face in the shit. I’ve done a lot of what I thought at the time was exercising patience and showing compassion,” she reflects. “Over time, I’ve learned that boundaries are really compassionate.”
New Avatar lives in the tension between political reckoning and personal tenderness, as Kelela searches for beauty, intimacy, and love against the backdrop of a world in decline. Its opener, “Idea 1,” was inspired by Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, whose young protagonist Lauren Olamina flees her home in a climate-ravaged world (somewhere between 2024 and 2027) and creates a survivalist belief system called Earthseed.
Earthseed’s philosophy, “God is Change,” feels applicable to the message of New Avatar. “Through Earthseed, they—and in turn we—are offered the benediction of hope,” LeVar Burton writes in the book’s foreword. “The hope that through virtue of resilience and principled action, there just might be redemption for our sins against humanity for all.” Amid the Evanescence-like goth rock of “Idea 1,” Kelela’s seductive croon becomes a balm, beckoning us toward respite from the chaos of our moment.
There’s a striking line on the second single, “point blank,” that I sat with for weeks, feeling its weight without fully understanding its meaning: “The bullet set me free.” At first, I wasn’t sure which direction the bullet was headed, away or towards her. Then, during a long walk around Prospect Park, I started to piece together the ego death and subsequent spiritual rebirth that the lyrics traced. That’s the thing about Kelela: she sings in riddles. Her lyrics demand kinetic engagement to unfurl, rewarding the moment mid-singalong, on a crowded dance floor or during a late-night drive with friends, when everything suddenly clicks.
“We often feel like we have it worse under patriarchy, but I think the group of people who have it the worst are the people who don't know what's happening to them,” she says, when asked to unpack “point blank”’s lyrics. “The indoctrination and the arresting behavior—I think the stuntedness under patriarchy falls mostly on men and boys. There’s a different type of pain that comes from emotional stuntedness and an inability to self-regulate.”
Few artists can articulate sociopolitical realities without sounding didactic. Kelela is one of them. She credits the restraint and subtlety of her favorite films—Chocolat (1988) by Claire Denis, The Sound of Music (1965) by Robert Wise, Bamako (2006) by Abderrahmane Sissako, Dodes'ka-den (1970) by Akira Kurosawa, and Love Jones (1997) by Theodore Witcher—as guiding influences on her songwriting. “I like nuance. I want to see something more that I had to notice, not something that was overperformed,” she tells me.
That sensibility carries through her work, shaping not just how she observes the world, but how she imagines what comes after rupture. People talk about revolution, but rarely about what life looks like after the struggle. “New Life Forms,” featuring Fousheé, imagines that future. The song was inspired by a morning in Rio de Janeiro when Kelela and her friends, still wearing their club clothes from the night before, ran into the ocean at sunrise. It captures that same sense of liberated abandon. The world may be on fire, but they’ll still flirt with strangers, dance barefoot in the sand, and bare their bodies to the sun.
Although she admits that aside from “New Life Forms,” much of the album feels quite sad, Kelela insists she’s not a sad person. “Most of the time me and my friends, we’re laughing,” she reveals. “That’s also reflected in my audience. They are so funny. It really speaks to Black joy and the way we can talk about what’s really going on in a way that actually does not ruin our spirit.”
Fashion is another outlet for her sense of play. She keeps fans on their toes with an ever-changing roster of hairstyles: locs, 713 platinum-blonde bundles, black pixie cuts, shaved heads, and a blunt ginger side bang. She stops short of calling these looks personas. Instead, they reflect her refusal of singularity. She is a Gemini, after all. Fittingly, a few days after our interview, I came across a video of her skipping down the aisle of a vintage shop before striking dramatic poses in front of a mirror, reveling in the simple pleasure of playing dress-up.
New Avatar isn’t another example of her trying on coats for size. It isn’t a departure so much as a return. The first songs she ever made were composed on the guitar. “Pre-mixtape Kels,” as she puts it, “is an indie girly.” In the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was in the indie progressive metal band with her then-boyfriend Tosin Abasi, now the frontman of Animals as Leaders. Still, she’s not abandoning the experimental R&B she’s become known for. “I don’t feel like I have to make a statement that’s like, ‘Fuck R&B,” she says. She says she’s expanding rock’s possibilities. “I actually want to integrate this into what you already know. And that type of evolution is what I find interesting about artists over time.”
For fans worried about her disappearing again, Kelela already has completed records waiting in her archives, each one dissolving the arbitrary bounds of genre. She’s just waiting for the right moment to release them—if we’re lucky, a gentler chapter than the one we’re living through.