Kelela Covers Incubus's "Mexico," Revealing a Vocal Range She's Never Shown Before—Plus Her White Bag Logic

Kelela covered Incubus's "Mexico" live in a brand-new studio for Spotify's Live Room. After watching the footage, her friend's first reaction was: "I've never heard you sing that low." Even she was taken aback—she'd never pushed her voice into that range while writing her own songs. The performance dropped on September 2 alongside an interview with The FADER, where she also reimagined her own track "idea 1."

In a video interview on August 28, Kelela described Incubus's 2001 album Morning View as a "gateway record" for her—one that gave her and many other Black listeners a sense of belonging at a time when guitar rock's sound could feel exclusionary. When a viola player at the recording session heard she was covering the song, they immediately asked, "Do you know the whole album?"—and the two discovered they shared the same connection to it. She admitted that it wasn't until she started singing that she truly realized how much she loves frontman Brandon Boyd's vocal delivery, describing the feeling as almost like a "brotherly bond." Arrangement-wise, she kept the original cello part and added more strings to heighten the drama.

The cover wasn't a spontaneous whim—it ties directly into what Kelela calls the "White Bag" concept behind her new album new avatar. Released in July and produced almost entirely by Oscar Scheller, it's the fastest record she's ever made, drawing on the alt-rock influences she's collected over the years. Kelela says the term is half a joke, but there's real truth underneath: "If you've always appreciated a lot of different kinds of music, this will mean something to you. If you only listen to pure guitar music, it won't land." She recalled that Scheller originally caught her attention through his work with PinkPantheress and Shygirl—so when she walked into the studio and saw a guitar, she realized his range as a producer was much wider than she'd expected. After she played him her White Bag playlist, Scheller told her he wanted to make his own version.

The live version of "idea 1" came from another unexpected connection: Kelela came across a string arrangement of the song by producer Mocksun on TikTok and used it directly, trimming the original six parts down to four. She says she's always been obsessed with "leaving space," and "point blank" is the clearest example of that for her. The song's opening line—"the guns are pointed at me"—was originally an improvised ad-lib, and she worried it might weigh down what was meant to be a sexy dance track. It wasn't until Oscar Scheller followed it with "but the bullet set me free" that she felt certain the line could stay. She says what she's really trying to write is that complicated feeling of holding both rage and desire in the same song.

Asked why people are so fixated on music genres, she had one answer: racism.

Discussing her background spanning classical strings, punk, electronic, and R&B, Kelela was asked why people are so attached to genre categories. Her answer was blunt: "Because of racism." She pointed out that American pop music's origins are deeply tied to the Jim Crow era—R&B was once literally marketed as "race records," a label later swapped out for something that sounds more neutral. She cited scholar Matthew D. Morrison's book BlackSound, which examines music copyright and the history of blackface performance, as well as an earlier reference point: Amiri Baraka's 1963 book Blues People. Without understanding these origins, she argued, you can't really understand how the music industry categorizes things today.

Kelela is heading out on tour this fall in support of new avatar. Toward the end of the interview, she was asked what perfume she usually wears—and the answer was surprisingly specific: Tainted Love from Margot Elena's Tokyo Milk line, layered with Kilian's Love Don't Be Shy, dabbed behind the ears. As she put it, the second scent someone catches when you hug them is the real one.