Kelela's 'new avatar' runs her R&B through distorted guitars and keeps the tenderness

Kelela's third album landed Friday on Warp: twelve tracks, 40 minutes and 47 seconds, and a guitar sound she has never used before. new avatar is out now, produced almost end to end with Oscar Scheller, and it is the shortest, hardest record she has made.

The setup was three singles and a blackout. Kelela went quiet on social media in March, came back April 8 with "idea 1," a shoegaze-leaning track built on scratchy, blown-out guitar that Pitchfork named a Best New Track. "linknb" followed on May 5 with the album announcement, riding a busy, Mk.gee-adjacent guitar figure. "point blank" arrived June 1. By the time the album showed up, the guitars were no longer a surprise. What they are doing here is.

The guitar is the argument

The easy read on new avatar is that the R&B singer went rock. That read is wrong, and Kelela has said as much: she was not interested in singing over indie-rock instrumentals, she wanted songs that sit somewhere in between, "where it's neither here nor there," per her album rollout interviews.

Listen to what the guitars actually do on the record. They do not carry the songs. They abrade them. On "idea 1" the tone is fuzzed to the point of hiss and it rubs against her voice instead of cushioning it, which is the opposite of how a rock arrangement usually treats a singer. On "goin down" the guitars go reverbed and cavernous and the drums turn to fog, closer to Burial than to a band. Her voice has not changed. It still glides in that low, unhurried, honeyed way it has since Take Me Apart. Putting it against distortion and industrial percussion is the whole idea, and it works because the contrast is where the tension lives.

There is a reason "R&B goes rock" is a lazy frame anyway. Rock came out of Black music. Distorted guitars are instrumentation, not a border.

The features are back-loaded, on purpose

Kelela does not spend her guests early. The first stretch of the album is hers alone. A. K. Paul turns up on "outta time" (he produced and engineered it), and the two features that get the most attention, Fousheé on "new life forms" and PinkPantheress on "the bridge," land late. The effect is that the collaborators walk into a record that has already established what it sounds like, rather than functioning as the reason to press play. That is a sequencing decision, and it is a good one.

The credits are worth a scan too. Per the Tidal credits, the songwriting on one track lists Juicy J and DJ Paul, and another lists Craig David, which points to interpolations rather than cameos. Scheller produced ten of the twelve tracks. Joe LaPorta mastered it.

Where it lands

The record's best moment is its last. "if we meet again" is built on a line that is impossible to tell is a processed guitar or a synth, spinning in a loop, and Kelela ends the album by refusing the reconciliation the song keeps circling: "I don't wanna hear that I'm the best you've found / When nobody else is around." No swell, no resolution. She just stops wanting it.

The weak spot is the middle. Between the opening run and the guest tracks, the album's texture stays fixed long enough that a few songs read as mood rather than shape. It is a 40-minute record and it still has a stretch that would benefit from an idea rather than another guitar tone.

That is a small complaint about a record that pulls off something most artists nine years into a run do not attempt. Critics have been unusually united on it: Stereogum made it Album of the Week, Paste scored it a 91, AllMusic an 80. The praise is earned. new avatar is not Kelela reinventing herself for the sake of a new look. It is her chasing tenderness into a much uglier room and finding it was there the whole time.