On the striking cover of her new album, Raven, the face of Ethiopian-American singer Kelela emerges from the depths of a restless, mercurial sea. Both her and the waters surrounding her are the colour of onyx, raven black, making it unclear where one ends and the other begins. It’s an image that conjures many of the culturally and politically rich themes Kelela approaches on Raven, an album that signals a marked shift for her both artistically and socio-consciously. Since releasing her previous album over half a decade ago, the singer has been quietly observing the world around her shift on its own axis. Racially charged unrest in the US caused her to focus inwards, reaching out to her inner professional circle to ask the hard questions eating away at her brain. She cut ties with Sony Music. She took control of who had access to her sound, and her image. “I am a darker-skinned, Black femme who makes left-of-centre R&B/electronic music,” she told Billboard earlier this year. “I need to work with people who get it.” Those people, like longtime collaborators Asmara and Kaytranada, have often come from within the Black, queer rave community, where she and her music have been ardently embraced. Raven, in Kelela’s words, is in service to “the people who are there in the front row and have always been there. Queer Black people.”
While other pop artists in the mainstream who share similar sentiments in their recent work have paid tribute to the Black Queer community through assimilations of house and vogue beats, Raven takes the opposite approach. Kelela once again works with producers from the dance music realm, including her old guard of LSDXOXO, Kaytranada, and Asmara, but also new collaborators such as dancehall artist Bambii. Though what she creates with these club music pioneers on Raven is a remarkably subdued, grounded body of work that gazes at the dancefloor from a distance. Raven is pensive, careful, and stunningly intimate. Kelela pulls not so much from the sounds of jungle and dancehall, but rather from the spirit of these styles. They float, like ethereal phantoms sashaying through the cavernous expanse of Raven, filtered into spectres of themselves so that they become almost ambient in nature.
Download and stream Raven here
On The Run strips dancehall to its most essential parts, and allows these to expand into near nothingness. It teases, ever so slightly, that the whole thing might drop into bass heavy chaos. That it never does makes for something decadently seductive and full of tension. The breaks of Contact, a track about post-lockdown jouissance, are swathed in washes of oscillating and glowing drones, doing the impossible by making a jungle beat ooze. This ambient skewed approach, while a definite stylistic pivot from Kelela’s usually jagged avant-R&B, feels like a revelation for the artist. She’s most potent when she allows her voice to flow endlessly in space, draping itself languidly around just a few, unobtrusive elements. On Washed Away, she lets her voice swim through aquatic drone synths and twinkling chimes, blending into the ambience around her. On the title track, she again sings atop a single synth modulation. But here, things begin to ebb and flow. Raven gradually swells with layers of atmospheric drones and piano chords, crashing like a tidal wave into muted bass and Jersey club. It’s a stunning manifesto of Kelela’s intent and approach to the sounds of queer existence, easily one of the greatest in her catalogue.
Both these tracks harken back to the image of water, which in itself becomes a motif that flows through Raven. The overall atmosphere of this album feels deep and submerged, and in water, Kelela finds a metaphor that speaks toward her musings on Black and queer consciousness. Returning to the album’s artwork, Kelela’s sunken face harkens back to tragic images of Middle Passage, but instead of drowning, she becomes one with the sea itself. In the album’s press release, Kelela says, “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. 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.”
While Raven will likely divide fans by virtue of its slow-burn, there’s an immense power in Kelela’s new found stillness. It’s an evolution of an artist who has spent a lot of time thinking and processing through her anger, and an intimate alternate perspective on the experience of queerness. Instead of meeting anger with chaos or boxing queerness into the club, on Raven, Kelela instead assumes the quiet, matriarchal power of water goddesses like Oshun and Mami Wata, finding her strength in her rage. For Kelela, her’s is a mission in writing women of colour and queer femmes back into the narrative of electronic music, and Raven, in all its quiet brilliance, is proof of this.
Listen to the title track from Raven below.
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