2026 - Page 9 of 9 - MusicDrops.News

Kelela Answered Ten Years of R&B With a Shoegaze Album

Will Lisil July 6, 2026

Kelela spent a decade being the reference point other people used for what alternative R&B could be. Her third album is built on distorted guitars.

New Avatar came out on 10 July through Warp, running forty minutes and forty-seven seconds, and its genre list reads shoegaze, indie rock, grunge, electronic and alternative R&B — in roughly that order of surprise.

The Turn Is Real, Not Cosmetic

Forty minutes is also a deliberate length for a record this dense. Guitar distortion is fatiguing at volume, and an album built on it that ran an hour would be asking more of a listener than the songs could repay.

Artists announce reinventions constantly and usually mean a tempo change. This is not that. Shoegaze and grunge are guitar traditions built on volume, distortion and a vocal pushed back into the mix — close to the opposite of the precise, foregrounded, space-conscious singing Kelela built her reputation on.

Reviewers noticed the difficulty of describing it. Resident Advisor wrote that the record "reconfigures shoegaze, IDM and R&B into a Black, femme sound of the future", pointing to the fusion of distorted guitars with electronic production and contemporary R&B songwriting.

DJ Mag described much the same combination — indie rock, shoegaze and grunge, while retaining ties to her experimental club and electronic work. Two publications reaching independently for a three-genre formula is a fair indication that the record does not sit anywhere existing.

The precedent that makes it plausible is the one she set in 2015. Hallucinogen told a relationship backwards, beginning at the end — an artist willing to invert the basic structure of a break-up EP was never going to treat genre as fixed either.

The Club Instinct Did Not Go Anywhere

What stops this reading as abandonment is that the electronic side survived. She has not swapped one lane for another; she has layered a guitar tradition over the production approach she already had.

That is a harder proposition than a straight genre switch. A shoegaze record made by someone with no club background sounds like shoegaze; one made by a producer who thinks in club structures has to reconcile two rhythmic logics that do not naturally agree.

The Warp connection makes more sense of it than a label change would. Warp has spent thirty years releasing music that sits between electronic and rock without belonging to either, so a record like this arrives somewhere it fits rather than somewhere it has to be explained.

Three Producers, One of Them Her

A. K. Paul is a telling inclusion in particular — a producer whose own work lives in the same gap between guitar playing and electronic construction that this album is trying to occupy.

The album was produced by Kelela with Oscar Scheller and A. K. Paul. Three names on a record this stylistically specific is a small number, and her own presence among them matters.

An artist making a genre turn has two options: hire specialists in the new genre and follow them, or keep control and learn it. The production credit suggests the second, which is the riskier and more interesting route.

It also explains why the result is a hybrid rather than a pastiche. Someone who has fully handed over a guitar record makes a guitar record; someone still producing alongside brings their own instincts into it whether or not they intend to.

Naming the record New Avatar is about as explicit as an artist gets about what she is doing. An avatar is a chosen form rather than a true one, and the title concedes in advance that this is a version of her rather than a replacement.

A Career Built on Long Gaps

Her catalogue has never moved quickly. She emerged with the mixtape Cut 4 Me in 2013, then Hallucinogen in 2015 — an EP that told a relationship in reverse chronological order, which is the kind of structural idea that signals an artist thinking in projects rather than singles.

Take Me Apart arrived in 2017 to strong reviews, and was followed by a five-year silence. Raven broke it in February 2023, In the Blue Light came in 2025, and New Avatar is the third album in a career now thirteen years old.

The 2025 release In the Blue Light sits between Raven and this one, so the gap before New Avatar was shorter than the five-year silence that preceded Raven. The pace has quickened slightly, without becoming anything like prolific.

Three albums in thirteen years is a slow rate by any standard, and it is context for the genre turn. An artist who releases constantly cannot afford a reinvention, because the audience is renewed too often to follow one. An artist whose listeners have waited years between records has a following that arrived for her rather than for a sound.

Warp is also a label that has never required its artists to stay put. Signing there is, in itself, a decision about how much room you expect to need, and a record that spans five genres is close to the reason the label exists.

Why This Kind of Move Usually Fails

The genre pivot is one of the most commonly attempted and least commonly successful manoeuvres in pop. The failure mode is legible: the new genre is adopted as costume, the songwriting stays where it was, and the result satisfies neither audience.

What appears to have saved this one is that the songwriting is described as intact. Both publications quoted above identify contemporary R&B songwriting inside the guitar textures rather than replaced by them.

That distinction is the whole thing. Changing what a record is made of is a production decision; changing how the songs are written is a different and much larger one, and doing only the first is what makes a pivot convincing rather than desperate. Our piece on why release metadata decides who hears you covers a practical consequence — a record this hard to classify is also hard to file.

Shoegaze in particular is a forgiving destination for a singer who wants to be heard differently. The genre's defining move is burying the voice in guitar, which for a vocalist known for clarity is not a limitation but a disguise — and one that changes what the singing has to do.

The Filing Problem Is the Interesting One

A record spanning five genres has a distribution problem before it has an audience problem. Playlists, charts and shops all need one answer, and every available answer here is partly wrong.

Listing it as alternative R&B undersells the guitars; listing it as shoegaze hides it from the people who followed her for a decade. There is no correct choice, only a least-bad one.

Her own category is arguably the least useful of all. Being described for a decade as an alternative R&B artist becomes a constraint the moment the music stops matching, and a record like this is one way of refusing the label without arguing about it.

That is the practical cost of a record like this, and it is worth stating plainly rather than treating boundary-crossing as automatically admirable. Kelela has made something the systems around music are poorly equipped to handle, which is usually a sign the music got somewhere first.

Thirteen years in, that is a more interesting position to be in than a comfortable one.

New Avatar is out now on Warp Records.

Gorillaz Brought Six Late Collaborators Onto an Album About Death

Will Lisil July 5, 2026

Six of the voices on the ninth Gorillaz album belong to people who are dead. That is not an accident of the archive; it is the record's subject.

The Mountain — its title written in Devanagari as पर्वत — came out on 27 February through Kong, the band's own label, distributed by the Sony subsidiary The Orchard. It runs sixty-six minutes and twenty-two seconds and is the first Gorillaz album released without Parlophone.

An Album Made After Two Deaths

The premise is not a conceit. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett each lost a close family member before the band travelled to India to make the record, and both have described the result as a cohesive conceptual work about death and the afterlife, told through the band's fictional characters.

The liner notes make the dedication explicit. It is inscribed to both men's late fathers, to Hewlett's late mother-in-law Amo, and to twelve past Gorillaz collaborators: Lou Reed, Ibrahim Ferrer, Dennis Hopper, Proof, Mark E. Smith, Tony Allen, Bobby Womack, David Jolicoeur, Ike Turner, Terry Hall, MF Doom and Craig Duffy.

That list is a quiet argument for how long the project has run. A band twenty-five years old has outlived a substantial share of the people who passed through it, and a record about death made by that band has an unusually deep bench of ghosts to draw on.

Six of them appear on the album itself. Dennis Hopper, Bobby Womack, David Jolicoeur of De La Soul, Tony Allen, Proof and Mark E. Smith all feature posthumously, which explains why the recording credits list sessions from 2001 to 2010 alongside 2024 and 2025.

Using Archival Vocals Is a Choice, Not a Trick

Posthumous appearances have become contentious, largely because the technology now exists to synthesise a voice that never said the words. That is not what is happening here.

These are recordings the collaborators actually made, in sessions they attended, across the band's first three albums and the years around them. Using them on a record explicitly about the afterlife turns the archive into the argument rather than into a novelty.

It is also the only version of the idea that survives scrutiny. A song about the dead assembled from things the dead genuinely said has a claim to sincerity; the same song built from a model does not.

The living guest list is no less wide: Asha Bhosle, Asha Puthli, Anoushka Shankar, Black Thought, Idles, Johnny Marr, Sparks, Omar Souleyman, Trueno and Yasiin Bey. Two generations of Indian classical and playback singing sit alongside British guitar bands, American rap and Syrian dabke.

Recorded in Fourteen Places, Sung in Six Languages

The location list reads like an itinerary rather than a credit. Sessions took place at Studio 13 in London and Devon, Island City in Mumbai, 5020 and Criteria in Miami, and Sparks Studio in Los Angeles — and also in Jaipur, Rishikesh, New Delhi, Amritsar, Haridwar, at the Amber Fort in Rajasthan, on the ghats at Varanasi, in Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, in Damascus and in New York.

The performances are in English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Yoruba and Russian, and the album draws heavily on Indian classical instrumentation alongside the band's electronic and pop habits.

Recording at the ghats at Varanasi is the detail that ties the method to the theme. They are the cremation grounds on the Ganges where Hindu funeral rites are performed, and taking a record about death there is a decision about place rather than about sound.

The title came from the same trip. Albarn and Hewlett took it from their first visit to the Amber Fort in Jaipur, and from a mountain they had seen in western China while making the opera Monkey: Journey to the West.

Six languages on one record is a harder proposition than a long guest list suggests. A listener will understand at most two of them, so the majority of the vocal material has to work as sound and delivery rather than as text — which is closer to how instrumental music operates than to how pop usually does.

The production team was assembled to match. Albarn worked with Remi Kabaka Jr., James Ford, Samuel Egglenton and the Argentine producer Bizarrap, which is a set of hands spanning British indie production, Gorillaz's own long-standing engine room, and Latin American electronic music.

They Played It Live Before Anyone Had Heard It

The reveal was unusual even by this band's standards. On 3 September 2025 the album was performed in full as the final "mystery show" of four staged around Gorillaz's twenty-fifth anniversary exhibition, House of Kong, in London.

The other three shows were complete performances of Gorillaz, Demon Days and Plastic Beach — the three albums the archival vocals largely come from. Playing the back catalogue and then the new record in sequence made the connection audible before it was explained.

Eight days later the band announced the album formally, with title, artwork, an original release date of 20 March 2026 and the lead single "The Happy Dictator". Four more singles followed: "The Manifesto" in October, "The God of Lying" in November, "Damascus" in December and the double A-side "The Hardest Thing" / "Orange County" in January.

The date was then brought forward to 27 February, three weeks earlier than announced — the opposite of the usual direction of travel for a record of this scale.

Hewlett Wants You to Sit Through It

The band have been direct about how they expect the album to be used. Listeners are "supposed to listen to it from beginning to end", Hewlett said, describing an attempt to "bring back that idea of taking time to invest in something, instead of this culture of scrolling".

That is a large ask for sixty-six minutes, and it is the one part of the project the format works against. Our piece on what a new classical recording is competing with covers the same attention problem from the other end of the catalogue.

It is also consistent with everything else about the record. An album sequenced as a single argument about mortality, carrying voices from across twenty-five years, does not survive being sampled one track at a time.

The chart result suggests enough people accepted the terms. The Mountain entered the UK Albums Chart at number one — the band's third UK chart-topper — and reached number seven on the Billboard 200, with what has been described as widespread critical acclaim for its thematic ambition and stylistic cohesion.

Leaving Parlophone Was the Practical Decision

Underneath the concept sits a structural change. This is the first Gorillaz album not released through Parlophone, arriving instead on Kong with distribution handled by The Orchard.

A distribution deal is not a record deal. The label keeps a percentage and moves the product; the creative and financial control stays with the artist, along with the risk.

For a sixty-six-minute conceptual album about grief, recorded in fourteen locations across six countries with an eleven-strong living guest list and archival vocals to clear, that control is not an ideological point. It is what makes the record possible.

A deluxe edition and a Special Edition followed, which is the other half of owning your own release — the ability to keep issuing versions on your own schedule rather than a label's.

The timing of the move is worth noting. Bands usually leave a major label after a commercial decline, when the deal has stopped being worth its terms to either side. Gorillaz left before making the record that went to number one, which reverses the usual causality.

Albarn had signalled the ambition well in advance. Ahead of the band's Coachella headline slot in 2023 he said the next album would take the pair somewhere they had never been, and later called it a "paradigm shift". Work began after he finished his adaptation of the second part of The Magic Flute, at which point he and Hewlett went to India.

The Mountain is out now on Kong.

Panda Bear Built an Album From Harp Loops and a Mariachi Band

Will Lisil July 1, 2026

The instrument list on the new Panda Bear and Sonic Boom record reads like a list of things that do not belong together: harp, steel drum, pedal steel, and a mariachi band from Mexico City.

A ? of WHEN arrived on 10 July through Domino, ten tracks long, the follow-up to the duo's 2022 album Reset.

Four Instruments That Should Not Cohere

The press material describes a record "built on loops of harp and sequences of steel drum, webs of pedal steel, and even bits of a mariachi band from Mexico City".

Each of those carries a very strong association. Harp signals the classical concert platform or something deliberately ethereal. Steel drum means the Caribbean, and in most pop contexts means it lazily. Pedal steel means country. A mariachi band means Mexico so unambiguously that using it at all risks sounding like a postcard.

Putting all four on one record is either a mess or a method. The clue that it is the second is the word "loops": these are not guest performances dropped into arrangements but sources being cut into repeating figures, which strips an instrument of its context and leaves only its texture.

That is the technique the duo already used on Reset, which was built on samples of early rock and roll records looped into something that no longer sounded like its source. Applying it to a harp and a mariachi horn section is the same idea aimed at less obvious material.

Real Players, Not Just Samples

The collaborators confirm it is not purely a sample exercise. Noah Lennox and Pete Kember are joined by the harpist Mary Lattimore, the British multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan — known for work with Sunn O))) and Ulver — and the steel guitarist Zena Kay.

Lattimore is a significant name in her own right, an experimental harpist whose solo records use effects and looping rather than classical technique. Hiring her is a signal that the harp on this album is meant to sound like her harp rather than like an orchestral one.

O'Sullivan comes from an even further-out tradition — drone metal and Norwegian experimental music — and his presence suggests the record's textures go somewhere darker than the instrument list implies.

That combination of played and looped material is harder to assemble than either alone. A sampled loop is fixed; a live player can be asked to change, and reconciling the two means deciding, repeatedly, which one the track is actually built on.

There is a clearance dimension too. Building an album from samples of existing recordings, as Reset did, means negotiating with rights holders before anything can be released; commissioning musicians to play the material you want to loop removes that constraint entirely.

Recording a mariachi band in Mexico City rather than sampling one from a record is the clearest instance of that. It costs more and takes longer, and it means the parts can be written rather than found.

An Album About Being Tired of the Internet

The subject matter is the deliberate counterweight. Against what the announcement called the more playful sonic output, the pair address "online exhaustion and pervasive depression" alongside "political chicanery and ecological sustainability".

Online exhaustion is a difficult thing to write about without sounding either preachy or dated. It is also, at this point, close to a universal condition, which makes it more like weather than like a topic.

The musical approach may be the point. A record made from looped fragments of unrelated sources is structurally a description of scrolling — disconnected material arriving in sequence, each piece stripped of the context that would explain it.

Whether that reading is intended or imposed, the pairing works: bright, warm, faintly absurd instrumentation carrying lyrics about depletion is a more honest picture of the experience than a bleak arrangement would be. Our piece on what pre-saves and pre-adds actually do covers the machinery on the other side of that fatigue.

Six Weeks From Announcement to Release

The rollout was brief. The album was announced on 27 May with the title track, and released on 10 July — a six-week window, short for a record with this much going on inside it.

Leading with the title track rather than the most immediate song is consistent with the rest. It presents the album as an object with a name and a shape, not as a container for a single.

The title itself resists being typed correctly, which is either a joke about search or an accident. A ? of WHEN contains a punctuation mark and a capitalised word, and it is the kind of title that survives on being recognised rather than looked up.

Domino has released both this and Reset, which gives the collaboration a stable home. A duo project between two established artists frequently ends up on whichever label one of them happens to be signed to; a second album on the same imprint suggests it is treated as a band rather than as a side venture.

Ten tracks is the other decision worth noting. It is short enough to be heard in one pass and long enough to establish a method, which for a record built on unfamiliar combinations is close to the minimum viable length — a listener needs to hear the approach more than once before it stops sounding accidental.

What Each of Them Brings

The partnership is unusual in that both halves have long histories. Lennox has released six solo albums as Panda Bear since 1999, including Person Pitch, Tomboy and Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, the latter two reaching the Billboard 200.

He is also a co-founding member of Animal Collective, who spent most of 2025 marking the twentieth anniversary of Feels — which places this record immediately after a year of looking backwards.

His work outside both projects covers a wide spread: Daft Punk's "Doin' It Right", Dean Blunt's "9", and Braxe + Falcon's "Step by Step". That is a musician who has spent twenty-five years being useful to people making very different records.

Kember's contribution is harder to summarise briefly and easier to hear. His production work has long been defined by treating repetition and drone as the structure rather than the background, which is precisely what a record built on loops of harp requires.

Two albums in, the collaboration has stopped being an experiment. What A ? of WHEN adds is the demonstration that the method works on material with no obvious relationship to each other.

The pairing also solves a problem each of them has separately. A solo Panda Bear record carries the whole weight of a distinctive voice with nothing to push against; a Kember production without a strong singer can drift into pure texture. Together the parts constrain each other.

The touring picture supports that reading. The two have been playing festival stages together through 2026, performing as a duo behind keyboards rather than assembling a band — a live format that matches how the records are built.

What the album does not do is resolve into a single sound. Ten tracks assembled from four unrelated instrumental traditions will never be tidy, and the evidence of Reset is that tidiness was never the objective.

A ? of WHEN is out now on Domino.

Year: 2026