Kelela Had an ‘Existential Crisis’ Over Her Late Start in Music. Now, at 43, She’s ‘Never Felt Jaded’ (Exclusive)

Kelela tells PEOPLE about harkening back to her early days as an “indie girl” to create her latest album, ‘New Avatar,’ out now

NEED TO KNOW

• Kelela’s third album, New Avatar, is out now

• The musician tells PEOPLE about how the project harkens back to her early days in music as a self-described “indie girl”

• Kelela also recalls feeling “behind” in music before getting started as she approached 30

Kelela didn’t expect to make her third album, New Avatar, as quickly as she did. 

Since the critically acclaimed, genre-bending artist’s last body of work, Raven, came out in 2023, she toured the world and released both RAVE:N, The Remixes in 2024 as well as a live album, Into the Blue Light, last year. Fans are used to waiting patiently for new music from Kelela, who previously took a five-year hiatus between her 2017 debut album Take Me Apart and Raven, but New Avatar (released on Friday, July 10 via Warp Records) came together in less than a year. “That’s, for me, astronomically fast,” the 43-year-old musician, whose full name is Kelela Mizanekristos, tells PEOPLE in a Brooklyn recording studio.

New Avatar combines Kelela’s signature electro-R&B sound with indie rock and alternative elements, and its 12 songs were created almost entirely with one collaborator: Oscar Scheller, who’s worked with stars like PinkPantheress and Lily Allen. For past albums, Kelela’s utilized a “time-consuming” process of enlisting several producers to perfect the layers of each song and then combining them herself to curate a unique sound. But as she worked in the studio with Scheller, New Avatar swiftly took shape with far less nitpicking over the details than she’s used to. “I’m trying to edit and be like, ‘Oh, let me just do one more take.’ And [Scheller is] like, ‘It’s fine, babes,’” she explains. “It’s so different from how I’ve worked in the past, and it was really exhilarating to do it that way.”

While New Avatar may seem like a sonic departure to some of Kelela’s listeners, the project harkens back to her early days as a self-described “indie girl” in the Washington, D.C. area, where she was raised by first-generation Ethiopian parents. After years of wanting to pursue music but never quite diving all the way in, she wrote her first song in 2010 at age 27 in a “punk house” called the Crab’s Claw in Mount Pleasant, where she also performed live for the first time as a member of the band Dizzy Spells. “That was one of the first times I was able to share my music, and it was really formative because I was coming from digesting a lot of jazz music and just existing in a whole ‘nother scene in the city,” she recalls.

At first, Kelela felt liberated by the scene’s sense of freedom. “It’s not about being perfect. It’s about f—ing up a little bit and people being more interested in the experiment rather than the execution,” she says. “I was definitely, around that time, just afraid to f— up and sound bad.” But she later realized experimentation wasn’t exactly encouraged beyond the genre and felt confined by the limits of an indie space where “White boys were ruling the music world in a specific type of way,” she adds. “What was being valued was pretty f—ing specific, and it did not center Black femmes at all.”

Kelela wanted her music to reflect all sides of her, and she wasn’t interested in pandering to that crowd. “Nobody wants to hear you do some other s—,” she says. “I wanted to sound like the future and not like a classic indie band.” So, she moved to Los Angeles later in 2010. Over the next few years, she met a group of collaborators from the record labels Fade to Mind and Night Slugs and worked with them on her 2013 debut mixtape Cut 4 Me, which found Kelela singing R&B melodies over club beats. “When I first heard those tracks, I was like, ‘Okay, this is what I’m talking about. I can lead with this. I can go to a lot of different places from here,’” she notes.

With each subsequent project — 2015’s Hallucinogen EP, as well as Take Me Apart and Raven — Kelela’s expanded her artistry and built an especially dedicated base of fans ready to follow her journey, which is part of why revisiting alternative music for New Avatar is “gratifying” in this phase of her career. “I feel endlessly motivated to build the tapestry on the outside of me that I see on the inside of me,” she says. “I’ve finally gotten to a place where I’ve had enough time to say many things and to build some of these arcs that I’ve always wanted to build.”

Many artists release music at a rapid pace to keep up with trends and listeners’ short attention spans in the age of social media. Kelela, on the other hand, has always worked at her own speed, which fans accept because she consistently delivers with art that’s not only rich in quality but purpose. “I think that I have credibility because I’ve been like, ‘Come on, let’s go over here. I’m going to show you a thing that you may or may not know or like, but I promise you, maybe a little bit later, you’re going to be like, wait, I actually need this again,” she explains.

Kelela also aims to show listeners how different genres connect to one another in a world where musicians are often expected to stick to one path. “I’ve always wanted to dismantle a lot of those structures and really place a lot of reverence on Black American contributions, which have been truly, deeply and widely foundational to pretty much everything,” she says. “I think it’s an important thing to state these facts while having room for experimentation.”

One artist who inspired Kelela’s approach to world-building is her close friend Solange Knowles, a polymath whose work includes music, performance art, design, teaching and amplifying Black artistry through her Saint Heron platform. “I think that range is part of what made us connect, seeing many different parts of ourselves in each other,” says Kelela, who featured on the song “Scales” from Knowles’ 2016 album, A Seat at the Table. “She’s just so brilliant.”

View this post on Instagram

New Avatar feels like the start of a new page in the book of Kelela’s career, and it’s not lost on her that she’s hitting new strides in her mid-40s. There was a time when women in music were largely dismissed by the industry after turning 35, and she long feared that would be the case for her before officially getting started in her late 20s. “I definitely felt behind,” admits Kelela, who recalls experiencing “an existential crisis, basically, around whether or not I will fulfill my dreams” before making Cut 4 Me.

Now, she’s grateful for — and motivated by — the journey. “I’ve never felt jaded because I didn’t even get to do it until I was 30,” she says. “So the feeling of, ‘Oh my God, this is really exciting,’ it’s just not leaving me. I still feel so blessed and privileged to be able to do this for a living.”

Over the past decade-plus, Kelela’s also gotten to see her work inspire newer artists — including PinkPantheress and Fousheé, who are both featured on New Avatar. “I’ve learned so much from them from far away, just autonomously, what they are doing in their own journeys and experiments. It’s just really stimulating for me as an audience member,” she says.

“They are trying to find places between things that have been established in a way that feels so expansive and makes me learn something new,” adds Kelela. “I feel like I live in a world that incorporates both of those things.”

That world will soon come to life on Kelela’s upcoming tour, which kicks off this fall. “I’m just very excited about doing these songs live and being able to weave between the guitar-forward stuff and the dance music,” she says. “That swirl is my goal for this.”

Read the full article here