|
https://pitchfork.com/story/the-music-that-made-kelela/?utm_mailing=p4k_nl_6726_hotlinks_091626_p4inwrqtl1&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=p4k&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&utm_content=p4k_nl_6726_hotlinks_091626_p4inwrqtl1&cndid=71028083&utm_term=6726
Kelela on the Music That Made Her
The singer’s taste is just as eclectic as her own work
By Kiana Mickles
September 15, 2026
For Kelela, selecting a single album to define every five years of your life is an abominable prospect. “I mean, I like the game, but I just can’t,” she says while seated on a peach-colored couch in her Brooklyn studio, rolling a joint with her extra long nail extensions. Growing up, she explains, “I was struggling trying to hone in on one thing. I was listening to Mariah Carey but I was also listening to Incubus. Maybe that complicates this for you, but that’s my genuine real self.”
More than a decade ago, Kelela entered the musical ether just as a new wave of avant-R&B was cresting. The ice-cool beats of her first EPs, Cut 4 Me and Hallucinogen, lived in a nook between grime, R&B, and deconstructed club, while Take Me Apart funneled all the genre fuckery of those early records into a masterful narrative of heartbreak. She further expanded the idea of what her music could sound like in 2023, releasing an immersive ambient album called Raven then following it up with In the Blue Light, a set of live jazz renditions of her catalog recorded at the Blue Note.
On a cursory glance, her latest project, new avatar, which travels through grunge, shoegaze, and touches of nu metal, might seem in opposition to her sonic identity. But guitar music has always been part of her journey. Before Kelela was hanging out with genre-agnostic collectives in Los Angeles and, later, skulking around the club scene in New York, she was singing in small graffiti-tagged venues in Washington D.C. as the frontwoman of indie rockers Dizzy Spells. She also spent years jamming with boyfriend Tosin Abasi of the progressive metal act Animals as Leaders.
But to say that new avatar is only a rock album would also be incomplete, since it also includes UK garage, New Orleans bounce, and her own Fade to Mind-era fractured R&B. “When I first started sessions for the new album, I was like, Oscar, I know I’m going into the guitar zone, but I don’t want to abandon dance music,” she says, referring to her producer, Oscar Scheller. “That has always been an ethic of mine. I don’t want to abandon this other thing in order to make a new statement.”
The timing for new avatar’s arrival—and its ongoing tour—is auspicious. Rock is everywhere, and, more notably, it’s omnipresent in the world of Black alt-pop. Albums from Black femme stars Ravyn Lenae, Nia Archives, and Kelsey Lu are centered around the guitar, channelling the angst, nostalgia, and drama of the kind of music countless Black kids tucked away in secret playlists in high school. “I did not do that on purpose,” says Kelela, about the album’s synchronicity with this moment. “I was honestly just like, this is what they don’t know they need right now. Black people who have always listened to alternative music, those are the people I made it for.”
The music that made Kelela herself is, unsurprisingly, just as diverse as her work. Her universe is filled with Ethiopian tapes, long nights downloading suspect links on Napster, and even the classical charms of The Sound of Music.
Tracy Chapman: Tracy Chapman
My parents had a pretty tight record collection. If we had any music, they were tapes for the most part. Ethiopian music always existed in the background, which we listened to during weekend gatherings. But the music I was really studying was American. The first was Tracy Chapman's first record. That was a tape my dad had in his car, a light blue ‘88 Pontiac Lemans—and he really cared about his tapes, it was this whole thing. With this record, I think my dad was secretly trying to embed a certain politic in my five-year-old brain, so we would listen to it all the time. It’s a front to back situation. I know the number of seconds of silence. I can sing the next song in the right key. It’s that embedded in my body. Honestly, they’re all bangers. I’m looking through the tracklist right now: “Across the Lines,” brilliant. “Fast Car” is just extremely emotive. They all speak to a certain type of tenderness in a cold world, you know what I mean? Like, I'm maintaining a certain type of softness, I’m fighting for that softness, and the world is by default pretty unkind.
The Sound of Music I do have to shout out as well. That was my introduction to performance and feeling enthusiastic about singing. Some of Julie Andrews’ performances, I'm like, you ate.
Janet Jackson: Rhythm Nation
Rhythm Nation into Janet. was a formative one-two punch for me. I remember when Janet. dropped: I was in the fifth grade, and it was revelatory. But Rhythm Nation already had me feeling some type of way. As a film it’s so important. It was giving abstract militants, even though when you’re that age, you don’t even know what the fuck you’re actually feeling about anything. You are receiving some of the messaging through the songs, but through imagery you can really start to understand the lyrics. In the film it was like, We got to keep the kids away from drugs; there were so many silly tropes in it. But the community aspects, the messaging of “we protect each other” followed by her coming out of her shell on Janet., really put me on. There is angst embedded even in the most romantic and sexy whirlwind. And that's romantic misogynoir. The oscillation between “don’t fuck with me,” and then “touch my body, I’m so fucking sexy,” is a swirl you can really hear in my entire trajectory. Somebody once tweeted that all of Kelela’s songs are pretty much like, “Hey, dummy, we fucking or what?”
I remember in my three-CD changer I had Voodoo, Mama’s Gun, and Butterfly. For a very long time, I don’t think I actually switched anything up, and then I remember there was Pink Floyd and Incubus. That was when I first got into my white bag in a different type of way. So, there were the albums that I was digesting around that time, and then there was also the discovery of garage and UK funky in my room by myself. This is when Napster came out, and because it was Napster, it wasn’t an album thing—it was giving songs with a long file name that would have all kinds of punctuation, you know what I mean? And you didn’t know what you were gonna get, you didn’t know what you were gonna download. I would just be clicking a bunch of shit. One of the first songs that affected me at the time was “Something” by Craig David and Artful Dodger. It was my first time hearing a song that sounded like it had a sample even though it didn’t, and it really tore me out.
Amel Larrieux: Morning
That was when I was obsessed with Amel Larrieux. Her pen is crazy. Well, her voice is just as crazy. And during her performances, her live arrangements were like she was approaching it from the jazz school of rearranging. The original record was mind blowing, and then I would go to these shows and she would just show me another way to think about the songs. She used to do covers as well, where she would completely flip them. I’m inspired by it being a mixture of things, the way that you have heard it on some level, and bringing in things from worlds of music that felt outside of what people might perceive her to like.
Around that time, when I was about 18, I was also listening to the Ethiopian singer Gigi. This was my first time getting into a full album of music, and she did a record with a bunch of jazz heavy hitters. It was seminal for me.
Fiery Furnaces: “Quay Cur”
The band I was obsessed with at the time was the brother and sister duo Fiery Furnaces. There were some things on Blueberry Boat that took me out. I’m sorry I have to do this, I haven’t heard this song in so long. There’s a lot of psychedelic experimentation, lots of synth. The way she articulates, how she—I can’t explain it. It’s just so white. This is a time when white people were doing white shit, remember that? They tore.
I remember writing Matthew Friedberger a big email, I couldn’t believe he actually responded. Matthew Friedberger, if you’re out there, my God. I can’t remember what I wrote but I know that I really went in and told him how much I was fucking with it, and he wrote me such a sincere response. I love this band. Every time they would perform, they’d also flip the song, like to the point where you would not recognize it until you start to hear the lyrics, and you're like, Wait, what? And that just spoke to the jazz girly in me. I was highly stimulated by this at the time.
Arca: Xen
It’s hard for me to think about what I was listening to at this time. It was my first time working on a project and giving it my all, so I was kind of not listening to music in the same way. I was just discovering the people that I was trying to work with. I was living a double life at this time. In one life I was being exposed to the metal world. I was going to shows and dating somebody who played a seven- and eight-string guitar with really prog-y and left-of-center chord progressions and time signatures. It was sort of a post-Dizzy Spells place that I went to with guitar. And on the other side, I was just discovering all of the Fade to Mind and Night Slugs people, so I was listening to a lot of those records. Arca’s first record was the thing that took my head off. I was like, okay, this is a reorientation, I have to rethink every single thing. (Ed’s note: After publication, Kelela clarified she was actually referring to a different Arca project: “I realized it was a mix that felt like a record, it’s called Baron Foyel and it was her first project.”)
Solange: A Seat At The Table
I sang on the record, but before I was ever on the record, I was just like, whoa. This record is timeless but it also feels like a timestamp in terms of the mark it left on so many of us after it dropped. It’s an incredibly courageous album both sonically and aesthetically; those anthems provided a certain amount of safety we didn’t even know we needed. I think I may have cried when she played those demos for me for the first time. Bless Solange and A Seat at the Table.
Joshua Crampton: Profundo Amor
I love what he’s doing with the guitar on this record. It feels deliciously abstract, and also rooted in a lot of familiar elements. Profundo Amor is one of the records I was listening to when I was doing vibe checks for new avatar. I had the pleasure of seeing Los Thuthanaka at MoMA PS1; the sound design was next level. I love their explorations of experimental guitar and electronic production. That intersection is never gonna get old for me. That, for me, is the final boss intersection. I didn’t want to abandon this other thing in order to make a new statement—that has always been an ethic of mine. I’m thinking about my arc and I’m thinking about the eras of Kelela. I’m thinking about my trajectory in this way, rather than, Do people have what it takes to receive this message?
Kiana Mickles is a staff writer at Pitchfork. They previously worked as the reviews editor at Resident Advisor. They were born and raised in New York.
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
The Lesson
