Kelela’s New Album ‘Raven’

Kelela’s New Album ‘Raven’

It’s her follow-up to 2017’s acclaimed ‘Take Me Apart.

Electronic-leaning R&B singer-songwriter Kelela returns today with Raven, the long-awaited follow-up to her acclaimed 2017 debut album, Take Me Apart. In an Instagram post, the D.C.-born child of Ethiopian immigrants describes the new album as “a 15 track deep-dive into facets of dance music that have always excited me.”

Take Me Apart includes five previously released singles: “Washed Away,” “Happy Ending,” “On the Run,” “Contact,” and “Enough for Love.” Kelela worked with 15 producers on the project, among them LSDXOXO, Florian T M Zeisig, and Yo van Lenz. According to a press release, the LP’s theme of broken relationships derives from Kelela’s “feelings of isolation and alienation as a Black femme in dance music.”

Kelela told The New York Times that she wants the songs on Raven to “help Black femmes heal.” “It’s gotta be a lyric that Black and brown women and nonbinary people, marginalized people, can scream in their cars on the way to work a job that they actually don’t want to do,” she said of her approach to writing.