A surprise live album from beloved LA singer Kelela is just what we needed.

It’s been over a decade since LA-based singer Kelela released her foundational debut EP Cut 4 Me on Night Slugs affiliated label Fade to Mind. I remember attending an early show in 2013 at the iconic Roxy Theater in Hollywood where the singer opened for brothers Andrew and Daniel Aged aka inc. no world with support from Total Freedom (who now goes by Bobby Beethoven). The futuristic R&B presented that night, equally inspired by soul and the left-field club sounds explored at Mustache Mondays and Fade to Mind undergrounds, would come to define Los Angeles for much of the ’10s and even crossover into the mainstream pop and R&B worlds (see FKA twigs x inc, Frank Ocean, etc.)

Fast forward to 2025 – the sounds of Kelela and inc. continue to reverberate in Los Angeles and around the world. This past week, Kelela released a surprise live album on Warp Records titled In The Blue Light. Recorded over two nights at the Blue Note Jazz Club in NYC, the album features “unplugged” style renditions of tracks from across the singer’s decade-plus discography. Co-produced by inc. no world’s Daniel Aged, the performance is in many ways an expansion of the harp and piano-led live configuration that the singer showcased on her beloved Tiny Desk Concert last year.

The set opens with a live harp sampling of Susumu Yokota’s “Hagoromo” over “Enemy,” a callback to Kelela’s 2019 Aquaphoria mixtape where she sings over tracks by Autechre, Aphex Twin, Oneohtrix Point Never, Lury Lech, Jonny Nash & Suzanne Kraft, and others. Kelela: “I’ve always used my voice to dismantle, deconstruct and traverse genre, but this time instead of a turn up, it’s for solitude, intimacy and quiet time. This one is for my people to feel whole when they are alone.”

Stripped-back arrangements of “Raven,” “Take Me Apart,” and “Bankhead” (a classic from her first EP) follow with Detroit-based harpist Ahya Simone setting a sort of cosmic jazz meets R&B with her playing, harkening back to the spiritual works of Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane (the Detroit <-> LA harp connection). Interspersed between originals from 2023’s Raven and 2017’s Take Me Apart, Kelela calls out heroes like Joni Mitchell, specifically her jazz-folk Hejira era, with Daniel Aged playing Jaco-esque fretless bass as she covers “Furry Sings the Blues,” and later pays tribute to one of her favorite singers, the Detroit-born jazz vocalist Betty Carter, with “Love Notes.”

“Cherry Coffee,” possibly our favorite Kelela song, closes out the set featuring a beautifully minimal arrangement starting with just fretless bass, a synth drone, and Kelela’s deeply melancholic vocal before opening up into cascading harp, piano, and backing vocals. “You’re in deep, I see what’s going on / It’s a twisted cycle you confuse with love / I’m in deep, feel like I’m a die / A fade to mind / I keep letting go but I know you’re holding on.”