For Kelela, selecting a single album to define every five years of your life is an abominable prospect. “I mean, I like the game, but I just can’t,” she says while seated on a peach-colored couch in her Brooklyn studio, rolling a joint with her extra long nail extensions. Growing up, she explains, “I was struggling trying to hone in on one thing. I was listening to Mariah Carey but I was also listening to Incubus. Maybe that complicates this for you, but that’s my genuine real self.”
More than a decade ago, Kelela entered the musical ether just as a new wave of avant-R&B was cresting. The ice-cool beats of her first EPs, Cut 4 Me and Hallucinogen, lived in a nook between grime, R&B, and deconstructed club, while Take Me Apart funneled all the genre fuckery of those early records into a masterful narrative of heartbreak. She further expanded the idea of what her music could sound like in 2023, releasing an immersive ambient album called