SwitcherooE

The Artist

Gelli Haha is the project of Los Angeles artist Angel Abaya, a songwriter and performer who emerged from the West Coast DIY and art-pop underground before stepping out under this alias. Her sound is playful and cartoonish on the surface but built on a serious foundation of retro synth textures, funk-adjacent grooves, and disco-pop instincts, delivered with a knowing wink. She presents Gelli Haha as a full aesthetic universe, wardrobe, characters, and all, closer to performance art than a conventional solo act. Coming up alongside acts in the Innovative Leisure and Sub Pop orbit, she's part of a wave of young artists blurring pop, kitsch, and experimentalism. Switcheroo is her debut full-length under the Gelli Haha name, an introduction to the world she's been building.

The Album

Switcheroo arrives as the debut Gelli Haha album, recorded largely in Los Angeles with a small circle of collaborators helping shape its plasticky, hyper-saturated production. The record leans hard into analog-sounding synths, novelty percussion, and vocal treatments that flicker between pitched-up cartoon voices and sultry deadpan. There's a deliberate lo-fi charm running through it, drum machines that feel handmade, arrangements that leave space for silly little hooks and non-sequiturs. Thematically it's a funhouse mirror pointed at modern life: identity, online performance, party culture, and the absurdity of trying to be a person right now. It rewards listeners willing to take something goofy seriously.

Listen For

The plastic-toy palette. The whole record is built from squishy synths, springy basslines, and drum sounds that feel like children's instruments run through a filter. Notice how much personality comes from timbre alone before any melody kicks in.

Angel's vocal shape-shifting. She's constantly switching characters, from breathy sing-song to pitched-up chipmunk to spoken-word deadpan. "Spit" and "Normalize" are good early tests of how far she'll stretch a single vocal idea.

Song structures that refuse to sit still. Tracks like "Bounce House" and "Gelliverse" swerve into unexpected sections, breakdowns, or key shifts rather than riding one groove. Track how often a song ends somewhere different from where it started.

The lyrical curveballs. "Piss Artist" and "Pluto is not a planet its a restaurant" pack absurd phrases and punchlines that reveal sharper commentary underneath the silliness. Listen for the line that makes you laugh, then think twice.

The closing shift in tone. After ten tracks of maximalist play, "Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep" lands somewhere quieter and stranger. Consider what that closer says about the character Gelli Haha has been building.