Kelela announces her New Avatar Live world tour and drops third single “point blank” ahead of her album new avatar, out July 10 via Warp Records
Kelela is not asking for more. She is taking what she wants and leaving the rest behind. On June 1, the Washington D.C.-raised, New York-based singer-songwriter released “point blank,” the third single from her forthcoming album new avatar, due July 10 via Warp Records, and simultaneously announced the new avatar live world tour, her most expansive live run to date and her first full multinational tour in years. The North American leg opens September 8 in Seattle and runs through mid-October, with the European stretch following immediately after. Public on-sale begins Friday, June 5 at 10 AM local time via Ticketmaster.
“point blank,” produced by Oscar Scheller, the same producer behind the album’s first two singles “idea 1” and “linknb,” is a drum and bass and UK garage-inflected piece of controlled emotional reckoning. Scheller, whose recent credits include work with PinkPantheress, has described his working relationship with Kelela as built around genre intersection and remix culture, putting things together that typically would not be placed side by side. The result on “point blank” is minimal and intimate, a song that uses sparse percussion and Kelela’s distinctively precise vocal delivery to map the psychological labor of loving someone who mistakes sustained care for an unlimited resource.
“We Are Down Bad”: Kelela on the Politics of Point Blank
Kelela’s accompanying statement is one of the more direct and structurally precise artist notes to accompany a single in recent memory. “I first outline the baseline dynamic, which is that we’re expected to endure men’s inability to self-regulate,” she explains. “The fantasy many of us are invested in is one where we do such a good job of holding space that it starts to rub off on our partner over time, eventually inducing some sort of revelation and building their emotional maturity.
Yet the more we pour into men, the more entitled they become. We are down bad.” The bridge, described as the one moment of physical satisfaction in a track that otherwise refuses to yield, is where the song briefly exhales before closing on its own terms.
new avatar, Kelela’s third studio album and her third for Warp Records, follows 2023’s Raven and features contributions from PinkPantheress on “the bridge,” Fousheé on “new life forms,” and A.K. Paul on “outta time.” The album, which Kelela has described as finding solace in confronting, uses the guitar as its primary vehicle for genre disruption, threading together fragments of Black femme experience across twelve tracks. The full tracklist runs from opener “idea 1” through closing track “if we meet again,” with production that the artist has said demands a broader rethink of what alternative, rock, and indie music can mean.
Full New Avatar Live Tour Dates: North America and Europe
The North American leg of the new avatar live tour spans twenty dates across the US and Canada, running from September 8 through October 17. Key stops include The Wiltern in Los Angeles on September 21, two nights at Brooklyn Paramount on October 9 and 10, The Vic Theatre in Chicago on October 6, and festival slots at Portola Music Festival in San Francisco on September 27 and III Points in Miami on October 16 and 17.
The European run opens October 21 in Lisbon at LAV and moves through Madrid, Barcelona, Paris at Élysée Montmartre, Cologne, Berlin at Huxleys Neue Welt, a stop at Turin’s C2C Festival on October 31, Amsterdam, and concludes in London. The full scope of the tour, 28 cities across ten countries, marks a meaningful escalation from Kelela’s previous touring activity and arrives at a moment when new avatar is already generating significant critical anticipation as one of the more formally ambitious R&B records scheduled for 2026.
