Kelela Leans Into Guitars on New Album ‘new avatar’

Kelela’s third album will not sound like the one that came before it. Where 2023’s Raven moved through hypnagogic dancefloors, bodies, and dissolving boundaries, new avatar pulls back toward something harder, more metallic, and distinctly urban. The record works with walls and windows, house-front echoes, and the steady presence of a lone electric guitar in a bedroom.

The shift is less a rock turn than a methodical move to unsettle the textures around her voice. Guitars appear not as riffs, but as a source of friction against her silken delivery. Kelela has always treated her R&B as a bridge—vocal warmth drawing listeners into spaces they might otherwise avoid—and here that instinct is put to work inside a colder frame. The album leans into contradiction: sinister alleys cut by the glare of subway light, private introspection set against the noise of the city.

It’s a logical pivot for an artist who refuses to make the same record twice. After Raven topped year-end lists and solidified her place at the intersection of experimental pop and club music, the pressure to extend that formula must have been real. Instead, Kelela has stripped back the fluidity that defined her last work and replaced it with something more angular. The result, from early details, sounds less like a rejection of her past than a deliberate recasting of her voice inside unfamiliar architecture.