Kelela : New Avatar
In the past ten years, there has been a vibe shift in terms of who’s making indie rock. It’s a genre that for so long has been dominated by skinny white dudes in white T-shirts wearing Chucks, wanking on about disillusionment, the yips about growing up into being an adult, sex, lack of sex—a myriad of dude issues, let’s say. Nearly a decade ago, a persistent publicist we’ll call “Jaclyn” implored me to check out this Bay Area musician, Melina Duterte, aka Jay Som, promising I would not regret it. So I gave a spin to “Baybee,” a cool, midtempo rocker written and performed by an Asian woman.
At the time you didn’t typically see women of color—this is 2017, mind you—in an indie rock format. But then I read the quote that floored me; Jay Som, a queer Filipino-American who at the time was opening a tour with like-minded musicians Mitski and Japanese Breakfast, told Pitchfork, “We’re all Asian-American women in indie music, which is mostly white-male-dominated,” Som said. “For me, it felt like we had a mission.” Pretty soon after that, with Toro y Moi, Arlo Parks and more recently Bartees Strange and Khruangbin, old rock was shipped out of the block. New rock, with different-looking and -sounding people, entered the realm with new ideas. It felt like this newness just might carry itself into other spaces. Hopefully.
Kelela Mizanekristos, better known as Kelela, recently told NME about how she grew up in a suburb of Maryland, listened to her mother’s soul records, and played violin while also digging hanging out in punk spaces, fronting an indie band called Dizzy Spells, and falling in love with indie favorites like The Fiery Furnaces and Metric. When she was starting out, she was an “indie girlie” who wrote her first song in a punk house.
Now that person? You barely hear from on her previous album, 2023’s Raven, a heady, baptismal, and transformative record, drenched in drum and bass rain, shooting down all the left-field electronic pathways, with a fine lacquer of ’90s soul interwoven between the low-end hits and ambient breezeways. Her follow-up New Avatar, a smelting of indie-rock communiques with electronic and R&B elements, is Kelela accessing all points of the artist’s past to mine something not just new but radically cathartic.
That vibe shift from almost ten years ago in the indie-rock scene edged its way into the electronic music genre, giving the synthy breakbeat genre more colors, more flavors, and a sense of gravity through guitar fuzz, all of which are on display on New Avatar. The chopped breakbeats of “Point Blank,” with those ethereal drum and bass atmospherics in the background, balance off the opening salvo “Idea 1” that could be an outtake from a benefit CD for the now defunct Satyricon punk club in Portland, Oregon, once referred to as the CBGB of the West.
Kelela, familiar with the punk domain, has no fear in smelting those grunge textures with slowed-down breakbeats on the heartfelt “goin down,” which documents a repeated pattern in a broken relationship. More of that heavy slowcore persists on the call for help that is “outta time.” It would be wrong not to mention similarities found on this winning experiment, such as the Unknown Mortal Orchestra-esque bluesy salvo of “against me” that bleeds directly into the spacey “crystalize,” which makes you wonder if Rubian Nelson should actually give Kelela a call on his next project. This right here? It’s working. We get into the beats, more of the UK garage flavor on “don’t piss me off,” which does swing for sure, but by that time, the cat is already out of the bag. These vivid modal rock dreams have already won.
Label: Warp
Year: 2026
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Kelela : New Avatar
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