Kelela - Frontline

What this video is

Released in February 2018 as a companion visual to Kelela's critically acclaimed debut album Take Me Apart (Warp Records, October 2017), 'Frontline' arrived at the peak of the alt-R&B movement's intersection with net art and post-internet visual culture. The song had already gained cultural traction when it premiered on HBO's Insecure in September 2017, embedding Kelela's voice within a Black feminist television…

Why it matters

The video is a landmark artefact at the intersection of alt-R&B and net art, demonstrating how Warp Records-era experimental R&B artists leveraged CGI and video game aesthetics as legitimate emotional storytelling tools. It helped establish a lineage of music videos using avatar-based or…

The director

Claudia Maté (born 1985, Madrid, Spain) is a Paris/London-based new media artist and digital director working across programming, 3D, video, videogames, virtual reality, GIF, and sound. She is co-founder and curator of the collaborative net-art platform…