Kelela: New Avatar (Purple Vinyl) [WARP RECORDS]

Why you'll love it

A limited purple vinyl pressing of her third album, 12 songs on Warp. Stereogum made it Album of the Week, and lead single "Idea 1" was a Pitchfork Best New Track.

This edition

• Limited Edition purple vinyl
• 12 tracks
• Warp Records pressing

About the album

Kelela has a habit of making records that critics struggle to file, and New Avatar is her most cheerfully unfileable yet: Stereogum's review said it "makes genre feel like a failure of language," which is about the nicest thing you can say to an artist who has spent a decade blurring R&B, club music and ambient into one long, luminous exhale. Made with Oscar Scheller and out on Warp in July 2026, her third album looks back to her early songwriting days in the D.C. indie scene and folds in shoegaze and grunge textures alongside the synths.

The singles told you it would be something special: "Idea 1," written while she was reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, earned a Best New Track nod from Pitchfork, and "Linknb," "Point Blank" and "Outta Time" (with A. K. Paul) followed. Fousheé turns up on "New Life Forms" and PinkPantheress on "The Bridge." Kelela has said she wanted it to help people reconnect with beauty and joy in a pretty unhinged moment, and on purple wax, at night, with good headphones, it does exactly that.

"Kelela's new album makes genre feel like a failure of language."
Stereogum

On Warp Records, first out in 2026.