Kelela

Kelela Mizanekristos learned violin in fourth grade and sang jazz standards in Washington-area cafés through college before spending the early 2010s pressing her voice against club production sharp enough to cut. The 2013 mixtape Cut 4 Me paired her with producers working the outer edges of grime and footwork, and the Hallucinogen EP that followed in 2015 told the story of a relationship backwards, from its ending to its first night. Take Me Apart arrived in 2017 and landed on critics' year-end lists across the board; after five years of near silence she returned with Raven in 2023. Her third album, new avatar, released in July 2026, brings guitar into the vocabulary and carries features from PinkPantheress, Fousheé, and A. K. Paul. The records hold two things in tension that rarely sit together comfortably: the warmth of slow, close-mic R&B and the cold geometry of music engineered for a sound system at three in the morning.