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Kelela VibeZ

Kelela makes R&B for a club that does not exist yet. Eighteen tracks from an artist who has spent a decade dismantling the genre and putting it back together wrong on purpose.

The most formally adventurous singer in R&B

Kelela Mizanekristos was born in Washington D.C. to Ethiopian parents, sang in jazz and progressive metal contexts before finding her lane, and emerged in 2013 with Cut 4 Me — a mixtape made with producers from the Night Slugs and Fade to Mind labels, the London and Los Angeles scenes then building a violent, metallic strain of club music out of grime, ballroom and UK funky.

Putting a genuinely soulful R&B voice over that production was the whole innovation, and it has shaped a great deal of what followed. Her albums — Take Me Apart (2017) and Raven (2023) — extend the idea, with Raven in particular functioning as a treatise on Black women's relationship to dance music, whose history runs through house and techno and whose credit largely went elsewhere.

What to listen for

The tracks with BPM in their titles are from Aquaphoria-adjacent mix projects, and they are the best demonstration of her method — she treats her own vocal as raw material for other producers to rebuild. "SERPENTWITHFEET_ALTADENA" and "DJ LAG_ONANON" are the standouts; DJ Lag is a South African gqom producer, which tells you how wide her network runs.

"Rewind" and "LMK"-era material are the closest she comes to conventional singles, and "Enough for Love" and "Contact" are the Raven highlights — the latter is a genuine dancefloor record.

"Happy Ending" and "On the Run" show the softer end. "Let It Go" is the most emotionally direct thing here.

Gorillaz's "Submission" with Danny Brown is the mainstream crossover, and a good illustration of how her voice changes a record it is dropped into.

Go deeper

Raven (2023) is the album, and it demands to be heard in order and preferably loud — the sequencing moves from submerged ambient into full club and back.

For the scene: Arca, serpentwithfeet, FKA twigs and Tirzah are the closest peers. Night Slugs and Fade to Mind as labels are worth exploring wholesale.

And for the argument Raven is making, the history is worth knowing: house music was invented by Black and Latino, largely queer communities in Chicago and New York, and techno in Detroit. Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan, Ron Hardy and the Belleville Three are where to start.

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