Kelela, has announced her debut album, Take Me Apart, the full-length is scheduled to drop on October 6th via Warp Records. Along with the announcement, Kelela is streaming the lead-track. “LMK.” The song is a battle cry for independent women as Kelela flips the heteronormative construct that women want to settle down. She demolishes that notion and turns this dance floor-ready cut into a weapon of empowerment, preferring a one night relationship while declaring “it ain’t that deep.”

Kelela’s debut album emerges as a portrait of an artist spanning the past and future of R&B. In her hands, however, the genre knows no boundaries and so Take Me Apart exists as an absolutely singular and fearless addition to a canon of recent classics. From her very earliest work, honesty and vulnerability have been cornerstones of Kelela’s art – even when clad in the armor of the avant-garde electronics she so deftly inhabits – and Take Me Apart sees her double down on both the emotional intensity and resonance of her message.

The process of crafting Take Me Apart embraced the approach of widely collaborative R&B, hip-hop and pop production while roaming a strange and wonderful path. Working with a cast of peers, Kelela deconstructs many results of their collaborations and builds them back up into pieces of a cohesive whole, effectively orchestrating these multitudes in aid of her singular vision. “It’s this tapestry I’ve knitted together that attracts different types of listeners and challenges them at the same time, often within the same song. That’s what I want to bring to my entire catalogue” says Kelela. Testament to this approach, the album opens with a stunning trio of high points from the low-slung mechanized swing of ‘Frontline’ to the kaleidoscopic splendor of ‘Waitin’ – by which point you’ve been pulled straight into the tale Kelela is weaving, and the warped and chaotic beauty of the title track before dropping into ‘Enough’ which sounds as if it could have been transmitted from a neon-lit jazz club in Akira’s Neo-Tokyo.

Kelela
Take Me Apart
October 6, 2017
(Warp Records)

1. Frontline
2. Waitin
3. Take Me Apart
4. Enough
5. Jupiter
6. Better
7. LMK
8. Truth Or Dare
9. S.O.S.
10. Blue Light
11. Onanon
12. Turn To Dust
13. Bluff
14. Altadena