Kelela started to think about the kinds of stripped-down guitar sounds that Joni Mitchell created on Hejira, or that emerged from the duo Buke and Gase. It was music that meant a lot to her long before the public came to know her — back when she fronted a metal band called Dizzy Spells and was still plugged into the scene in her hometown of DC. “I’ve always been interested in finding language for what I’m experiencing socially and systemically,” she says. 

Disruption has long been Kelela’s artistic mission. Her debut mixtape, Cut 4 Me, released in 2013, was ambitious and futuristic, while her full lengths — Take Me Apart in 2017 and Raven six years later — not only further cemented her as a visionary in both the dance music and R&B spaces but set her apart as a great thinker. Raven, in particular, saw Kelela explore what it meant to be a Black woman in the dance music scene. In the years following the Black Lives Matter movement and the uprisings of 2020, she saw those spaces expand and diversify. But Black women were still the ones being asked to hold people in power accountable. And as Kelela quickly learned, that work was starting to feel neverending. “A thread in a lot of my work is my experience with misogynoir,” she said in a 2022 interview. “While all of this was happening, I had also hit a real hard wall with men. I needed some renewal.” 

With a guitar, she unearthed a level of rawness and grit she had never explored before. That feeling alone inspired her. “It was really gratifying,” she says. 

It has been just as gratifying for her audience. At a ColorsxStudios listening party in Bushwick, fans were rapt as she played each song and explained its backstory. This wasn’t the usual pop pandemonium; members of the crowd were sincere in their engagement with the star, who had probably soundtracked their lives for the past decade. 

“Even seeing how her fans interact with her, it’s very respectful,” says producer Oscar Scheller, her creative partner on new avatar. Online, those fans have posted about digging into the album’s influences, references, and sonic layers as if they were reading through a syllabus. Meanwhile, critics have referred to the album as Kelela’s “most accomplished yet,” celebrating its cohesion and experimentation. 

In some ways, the “new avatar” is the act of unleashing Kelela’s potent combination of fury-plus-euphoria. It’s something that only she could have come up with. “She’s the blueprint for a lot of artists,” Scheller says. He first explored her discography when he started working with PinkPantheress, who made it clear that, for Scheller to understand the kind of sound she wanted, he had to get familiar with Kelela’s work.

Still, Kelela’s blueprint is constantly evolving — although there are familiar notes. “The reality is: N****s ain’t shit and the world is crumbling even more,” she says. “If I’m still dealing with that, my audience is most likely dealing with that. We’re all having to navigate the same structures. Maybe I have more conviction now.”

Kelela and I meet at Big Mercy Sound on a gloomy Tuesday in June because it’s where she recorded some of her new album. She also worked out of her home on the Lower East Side, in addition to studios in Los Angeles and London. She’s as effortlessly cool as you’d expect: Today, her hair is black and pin-straight with microbangs. Her long-sleeve top is colorful and chaotic, contrasting against the clouds outside. She has her right leg hooked under her left on the couch, showing off a pair of patent leather tabi boots.

She’s describing the jam sessions in LA, and her face lights up as we come to how she first met Scheller. Her friend LSDXOXO encouraged her to work with him; the London-born Scheller had just been part of PinkPantheress’ and Lily Allen’s most recent, very buzzy releases. Kelela agreed to visit Scheller at his studio. “I walked in and saw the guitars, and I was like, ‘Hey, what’s happening here?’” she recalls. When Scheller revealed that he was an indie boy, she was thrilled. “I found somebody who could help me find the intersections [between] the guitar and the club,” Kelela says.