Kelela: Take Me Apart [WARP]

Why you'll love it

Warp's pressing comes with a printed inner sleeve and a download card, pressed in the EU. Take Me Apart earned a Metacritic score of 84 and landed on year-end best-of lists across the board.

This edition

• Printed inner sleeve
• Download card included
• Pressed in the EU
• Lyrics included

About the album

Kelela describes herself as a second-generation Ethiopian-American who grew up in the suburbs listening to R&B, jazz and Björk, and all of it comes out on Take Me Apart. She spent four years on the album with the producers who shaped her earlier mixtapes, Arca and Jam City, who anchored it, plus Bok Bok, Kingdom, Dubbel Dutch, Al Shux and Ariel Rechtshaid.

The result is glitchy, glacial and gorgeous, R&B that borrows from UK garage, dance-pop and club music without losing its pop instincts. "LMK" is a sleek, confident come-on, "Frontline" walks away from a bad situation with its head high (it premiered on HBO's Insecure), "Waitin" shimmers, and "Blue Light" pulses like a late-night drive. Kwes mixed every track, and her voice sits right up front, intimate and in control. She has said the album is about how we navigate dissolving ties with each other while staying hopeful for the next chance at love, and the songs move between those two moods with real grace.

Stereogum called it a towering achievement, and critics heard echoes of Janet Jackson in its warmth. Four years is a geological age in pop terms, but you can hear exactly where the time went.

Also at Kops: more Kelela on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Warp (cat# WARPLP287), the 2017 album.