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

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.