Robust Kelela finally finds her voice with debut album

Shrinking woman is a big role for Chau

Kelela’s debut album, “Take Me Apart” (Warp), is bold stuff — genreblurring, trippy, glitchy, seductive, intimate, vulnerable — beauty and weirdness forged out of struggle and pain.

It arrives only a few months after Kelela’s 34th birthday, more than a decade after she began flirting with the idea of pursuing her musical passion only to encounter a series of dead ends. She broke through in collaborations with artists such as Solange and Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and with a buzzed-about series of recordings before tying all the musical threads together in “Take Me Apart.”

Could she have made an album this assured a decade ago?

“No way,” she says. “There were systemic reasons that it took me this long to find a way to say what I needed to say. In part it was because this industry, this culture says if you’re not 15 to 20 and have a major first rush, you’re not going to do it ever . ... In order to execute your vision in the world as a woman in general and as a black woman in particular you need to process a lot or be unafraid to lose power, opportunities, money. You have to be relentless. Some people can be brought up that way, but it’s rare to come out the womb feeling like that, and feel immune to a racist, sexist establishment. Now when I get resistance, I can combat that and shut it down. But I had to painstakingly accumulate that skill.”

The singer was born Kelela Mizanekristos to Ethiopian immigrant parents in Washington, D.C., and grew up feeling like an outsider in Maryland. Her father gave her Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation 1814” album as a child, and her future came into focus.

“It checked all the boxes,” she says. “The solid, incredible songwriting was so stimulating, even without the production. But on the production side there is so much innovative stuff happening. It is so rich sonically. And then in terms of reference, the (accompanying) film, the world she created around it, the message she wanted to share, it was really valuable as a template, a guide.”

Kelela immersed herself in the arts as child, as a dancer and aspiring violinist, and later worked as a singer in jazz cafes and later in a progressive rock band. Her omnivorous listening and learning fed a desire to make a record that connected all the musical dots, but she soon encountered resistance based on stereotypes.

“At first, you go through a phase where you’re just grateful to be here — ‘Thank you for inviting me!’ ” she says. But she soon realized that every attempt to veer outside the path prescribed for her would be a battle. She learned to cope by finding like-minded artists in various disciplines with whom she could share stories and experiences.

The album’s individuality was part of a wider mission for the singer.

“I want to empower,” she says. “It’s so (awful) out there, you can never have enough music that empowers black women. You can never have enough reinforcements, resources for black women to thrive in the world. The topic has been addressed a million times before, but it will never end because what we’re up against keeps morphing and we have to figure out how to beat it. I do this because it’s how I can change the world. The act of me just being robust in the world is so radical — it’s so radical for a black woman to think she’s going to be a star, because it takes so much to get there. It’s still a battle every day, but I feel happy because I feel like I cracked the code and figured out how to work through it. Now I want to give the map to other women.”

Big break. Hong Chau turns over the phrase. There have been many times the “Treme,” “Inherent Vice” and soon-tobe “Downsizing” star wondered if she was about to have one.

The New Orleans native has already gone from virtual unknown to budding television player to scene-stealer for directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Alexander Payne.

“Your first union job is like a break because now you’re in the union. ‘Treme’ was big, because that was my first time getting to return to a show,” said Chau, who played Linh for three seasons on the HBO series.

Her first movie role, playing a brothel employee with a heart of gold and secrets to share opposite Joaquin Phoenix in Anderson’s 1970s-set Los Angeles stoner noir “Inherent Vice,” effectively put her on the Hollywood map three years ago.

A few television stints followed as Chau turned up on NBC’s “A to Z” and, earlier this year, on HBO’s “Big Little Lies.” Making her second film appearance, in “Downsizing,” Chau steals the show again — this time from Matt Damon.

Payne’s science-fiction dramedy takes place in an alternate reality in which scientists have solved overpopulation by shrinking select human volunteers to the size of a Pop-Tart. Going “small,” dopey everyman Paul Safranek (Damon) finds his new life in a lavish resort community for miniature people lacking, but discovers meaning and newfound purpose in his budding friendship with Ngoc Lan Tran (Chau), a Vietnamese dissident shrunk against her will by the government.

Chau could relate to Ngoc Lan’s trials; her own parents fled Vietnam in 1979 by boat, ending up in the Thai refugee camp where she was born. “If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories,” she said. “But my parents had a difficult journey and their story always seems like a movie to me. So it’s nice, in some way, to kind of portray some fictionalized, adjacent version of their story.”

But the character has also faced scrutiny from critics over the heavily accented broken English she speaks in a cadence that some say veers into stereotype before the script — and Chau’s layered, dimensional performance — makes her a hero.

“One guy after a screening said, ‘So, that must have been a big deal for you, doing a character with an accent,’ ” said Chau. “I was like, ‘Why? Because she speaks broken English? Did she not come off as intelligent to you? What’s the problem?’ He didn’t even know what he had a problem with.”

Chau speaks highly of “Downsizing” and of working with Payne, and voices a reluctance to sound off exhaustively on issues of representation and inclusion in the industry. She acknowledges it’s hard in Hollywood for Asian female performers, but being choosy in her film work has reaped particularly enriching rewards so far.

“I don’t want anyone to think I took this role in ‘Downsizing’ because it was the only role available to me,” she said. “I’m not a passive participant in it. I actively went after this role after I read the script, I did the role the way I want to do it, and I felt like if I had an issue I could be honest with (Alexander) about it.”