Following 2023’s genre-busting Raven, which deftly blended R&B and electronica, the aptly titled New Avatar sees the singer-songwriter moving in a different direction. Before breaking out as a solo artist with her 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me, Kelela sang in a progressive metal band and, without eschewing the distinctive breakbeats and electronic elements of her previous album, the 12 songs here center guitars in novel ways.
New Avatar arrives at a happy paradox in its celebration of bodily pleasures and describing love’s pains through technology, a notion that’s embodied by the album’s vocal production. Kelela’s voice is often doused in delay or morphed into a psychedelic whirlwind that doubles back on itself. Conversely, tracks like “Crystalize” and closer “If We Meet Again” find her singing without much backing beyond clean guitar strumming or faint keyboards.
Even these quieter songs maintain a desperation and emotional intensity. The otherworldly “Outta Time” sees Kelela trading lines with English singer A.K. Paul about a crumbling relationship: “Fallin’ alone makes it real/I wanna feel, hey, where you goin’?” she begs. On “Don’t Piss Me Off,” she demands that her lover pick up the phone and come over, insisting, “We can go right away, fuck the foreplay.”
The album’s sonic intimacy that brings to mind trip-hop and neo-soul, and the soundscapes even suggest an improbable melding of the Cure’s gothic rock and the skeletal funk of Prince’s “Kiss.” Several songs on New Avatar take a single sound—like the clanging bells of “Point Blank” or the gently plucked guitar at the start of “Idea 1”—and loop it throughout.
Marking the album’s halfway point, the softly rumbling “Retaliation Lullaby” is a quiet-storm slow jam reimagined as a shoe-gazy love ballad. Set during a sleepless night as rain pounds down outside, Kelela tosses and turns, waiting for morning to wash away her longing. It’s the same yearning that drove Raven, only here it’s less urgent but no less potent.
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