'We need space to feel over it': How Kelela became alt-musics ultimate truth teller

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred We’re hunkered down in a dark stairwell on the side of a hotel facing a busy street in Hollywood.To passersby, we could easily be mistaken for two teenagers hiding in the shadows.

In reality, I’m sitting with Kelela, the electronic R&B architect whose uncompromising vision has quietly reshaped the contours of alternative music.Dressed in oversize sunglasses, an acid-washed tee, light blue jeans, checkered Vans and a vibrant auburn-colored French bob with micro bangs, she effortlessly rolls a joint with long ombre nails that mimic smoke and fire.She slips it between her lips and flicks a lighter stamped with a single word: Gotham.Her lighter choice is pure coincidence, she says, but it fits the apocalyptic visual universe she’s built for “New Avatar,” her dark, guitar-heavy third album that merges her early D.C.

indie roots with shoegaze, grunge, futuristic club music and R&B.Produced almost exclusively by Oscar Scheller — who has crafted tracks for PinkPantheress and Lily Allen — the 12-track project finds Kelela chasing intimacy, desire and emotional refuge in the midst of an increasingly chaotic world.

From the color-inverted cover art to her icy white hair and bleached brows in the video for “idea 1” — a song that draws inspiration from Octavia Butler’s 1993 sci-fi classic “Parable of the Sower” — the world-building is unmistakable.“I used it to describe the context … of these stories on the record,” Kelela explains about the Gotham visual concept.“It’s a basic reference, but it feels like it applies.

It’s the context for people needing to be saved and everything being f— on some level, but there still being hope.”Just a few miles from the Hollywood stairwell where we’re sitting, Kelela will translate her genre-flexing record for the stage at th...