- Kelela returns with her usual lush, seductive lyricism and vocal prowess, this time over quiet, aquatic beats.
- The world looks a bit different now than it did when Kelela put out her first album six years ago. 2020 brought a global pandemic and an eruption of the largest protest movement in US history, and the musical landscape underwent notable changes as well. Pop music has also become more hyper, more disco and generally more conscious of nightlife culture. This shift was cemented last year through releases like Beyoncé's Grammy-winning ballroom-influenced album, Renaissance, and Drake's attempt to riff on Jersey club and house, Honestly, Nevermind. During her absence in this time, Kelela was quietly processing and reacting to the changes in the world around her. In her first interview in years, she revealed that in the wake of the political unrest that has rocked the past few years, she sent her loved ones and business partners letters. These included a reading list of academic texts by Black writers and confrontational questions like, "How are you creating a more equitable environment for people of colour, especially Black people?"
This period of introspection has produced some of Kelela's most restrained work. Her second album, Raven, celebrates both the subdued terrain of ambient music and the analgesic bliss of jungle, club music and dancehall. To accomplish this, Kelela called some old friends from the dance music world, like LSDXOXO, Kaytranada and longtime collaborator Asmara. There are also new names, including the ambient duo Yo van Lenz and dancehall club queen Bambii. Even with a handful of dance floor-minded musicians on the album's production credits, Raven is still what I'd call an ambient album.
For an artist who spent much of her career acting as a link between sensuous, Janet Jackson-esque R&B and forward-thinking dance music, this genre pivot might sound like an unexpected move for Kelela. But the seeds for Raven were sown years ago, when Asmara and Kelela put their heads together for Aquaphoria. The 2019 ambient mix recorded in honour of Warp's 30th birthday saw Kelela's delayed vocals cascade over classic records from label affiliates like Aphex Twin, Takashi Kokubo and Oneohtrix Point Never. That year, when asked if ambient music was something the duo would pursue further in the future, Kelela entertained the idea, implying a keenness to write women of colour into the narrative of ambient music. "What makes Aquaphoria interesting is that we infused this sound that usually feels one way—I'm not going to catagorise that—and we were like, 'Let's make it feel this other way,''' she told Mixmag.
Water is a motif in Raven that, much like its use in Afro-diasporic rituals, Kelela employs to summon rebirth, romance and protection. It's an easy metaphor for an album that's largely about the power of radical change. Some of the songs read like anthems for the marginalised, like the album's shapeshifting title track: "The hype will waver / I'm not nobody's pawn / Don't need no favours / It’s all good I've moved on." These are lyrics relatable for anyone who has been victim to tokenism, sung over seesawing pads that, by the song's close, melt into confrontational synths and driving club music.
The lead single "Washed Away" ushers listeners into Raven's jewel-toned waters. It's one of the rawest cuts in Kelela's catalogue, not because of its poetic lyrics, but the profoundly visceral way it's delivered. The pads come in like a tide before Kelela's weightless falsetto sails out, and some of the best moments on the entire album happen after she sings her final line. Here, a seismic boom gives way to sharp synths that assemble themselves like amorphous molecules becoming crystalline, and a heavy splash signals the song's end. On tracks like the resplendent slow-burn "Sorbet," the role of water is more erotic: "It's waves / Rushin in / The taste on my mouth / Can we go again?" Raven's underwater mood is all-consuming and meditative, so much so that it takes several listens to fully comprehend all the infinitesimal details that contribute to its brilliance—the sound of water bubbling, a flourishing synth or Kelela's pristine, whispered harmonies.
With Raven, Kelela sought to write a record with Black femmes in mind, hoping that her own experiences of healing, of joy, of anger and of love would resonate with them. "I started this process from the feeling of isolation and alienation I've always had as a Black femme in dance music, despite its Black origins," she explained in the album's press release. "Raven is my first breath taken in the dark, an affirmation of Black femme perspective in the midst of systemic erasure and the sound of our vulnerability turned to power."
These intentions are actualised on the post-lockdown revelry of "Contact," a track Kelela serves with understated elegance and sensuality over hopscotching breaks as she details an evening that takes her and friends on a breezy ride through the West Side to the shadowy crevices of a dance floor. The world outside clubland might be grim but the remedy to that, she suggests, is coming together: "Loneliness I see in your eyes / It might just render you blind / Been getting harder these days / Contact we just have to make." On "Happy Ending," the dance floor becomes a means of catharsis amid the throes of dealing with an emotionally drifting lover: "Your lips and mine babe / Out on the floor / We're intertwined babe / I'm wanting more."
Kelela is wiser about her boundaries now and somehow, even sexier than she was the last time we heard her. She stands her ground on "Bruises," a song that could double as a riposte to an inadequate lover or any offender who passively upholds oppressive structures: "You wait for the encore / Wait 'til it breaks, wait for something to change / I can relate boy / But I changed my fate and my girl did the same." It sounds like the words of someone breaking up with a loved one, but still wishes them growth. It's a feeling Kelela is familiar with, having split ties with several business partners who turned out to be misaligned with her values after receiving her letters.
More grown energy abounds on tracks like "Closure," where Kelela takes full advantage of her sultry R&B vocals to make bedroom club music, replete with all the LSDXOXO-produced wet snaps, tinkering melodies and bass you can feel in your chest. East Coast rapper Rahrah Gabor adds a welcome, bossed-up edge alongside Kelela's wispy, longing melisma. It's hard not to feel the hair-flipping, hip-swivelling confidence exuded in Gabor's lines, like "I'm a grown ass woman, not a pickney / Got good knees, I'm tryna ride it like a six-speed."
"Far away" is a phrase repeated throughout the album. For longtime Kelela fans, "Fooley'' will sound familiar, Kelela's vocals immersed in Hallucinogen synths before finally bursting through the surface, repeating a mantra that narrates this exact transition: "Far away from," she coos with her gossamer falsetto, "submerged sound." It isn't clear if the phrase is an acknowledgement of her time away. But it seems that whenever Kelela is out of our reach, her music thrives in this distant universe.
Raven is the work of a careful observer, proving the R&B artist is just as poignant over ambient, jungle and dancehall, as she is on her more well-trodden terrain. As a Black queer woman navigating a whitewashed and male-dominated electronic music industry, Kelela knows when to come back, show out and take up space. The album's closing track, "Far Away (Washed Away Reprise)", says the same in less words, her vocals, breathy and strong, circling wildly around a blooming flower bed of string synths that slowly retreat into darkness.
Tracklist01. Washed Away
02. Happy Ending
03. Let It Go
04. On the Run
05. Missed Call
06. Closure
07. Contact
08. Fooley
09. Holier
10. Raven
11. Bruises
12. Sorbet
13. Divorce
14. Enough for Love
15. Far Away