Stepping into the Gelliverse Gelli Haha, the primary-color dance-pop project of Angel Abaya, is a pop-up book brought to life on stage. We met up with Abaya in Manhattan to discuss her “weird alien girl” persona, splashy live show, debut album Switcheroo, and where her world is turning next.
The house lights are off at the Bowery Ballroom, the 575-cap venue lit by a black and neon-green loading screen on the projector. A “geolokation” system boots up to the rattling march of Björk’s “Human Behavior.” Two band members walk onstage, joining a jumble of props and set pieces—yellow, blue, and red mesh building blocks, shiny silver mylar dolphins, a few small trampolines—and mime an argument before taking their places at the drum kit and synth stand. Soon, three laser-red dots appear in the audience like moving targets, swarming through a crowd that swells with applause.
It’s not long before the dots reach the stage, all of them clad head to toe in fire-engine red. Perched on the stage’s edge, their ringleader, Gelli Haha, sends her voice straight to the rafters for the opener: a bouncy synth track titled “Funny Music,” which she’s described as “kind of the thesis of everything that came after.” The “everything that came after” is a kaleidoscope of cartoonish, sometimes nonsensical dance pop. Its opening lyric—“I don’t write the rules”—is the first Angel Abaya wrote as Gelli Haha. From the looks and sounds of the pop-up-book world she’s brought to life onstage, Gelli Haha is more in control than Abaya lets on.
When I stopped by Bowery earlier that afternoon, the set was still coming together piece by piece. Power drill sounds and the smell of spray paint and soldering irons floated up to the mezzanine, where Angel Abaya and I sat tucked away in a curtained-off booth. It would be another six hours before she went on, but when Abaya came upstairs to meet me, she was already dressed in full Gelli-getup: a red linen puff-sleeved Fashion Brand Company romper with white piping, red fishnet tights, red split-toe Mary Janes, frilly white socks, Swedish Fish earrings, and red glitter eyeshadow. She also showed me her nails—claw-like 3D press-ons in a variety of primary-colored patterns, a handmade gift from a fan.
The color palette of Abaya’s musical universe is heavily inspired by the simple, hyper-saturated color-blocking of children’s TV: The Wiggles, Sesame Street, Teletubbies, Polly Pocket, and Care Bears. “Nineties kids’ shows are very interesting, because they’re not always cute,” Abaya said, sipping from a paper cup of tea. In that same vein, Gelli Haha’s own visual aesthetic is aggressively childlike in a way that’s frequently off-putting, even uncanny (it was around this point that I noticed Abaya’s creepy, bright-red contact lenses—Exhibit A).
For all its whimsy, Gelli Haha’s 2025 debut Switcheroo is rife with blink-and-you-miss-it moments of “Wait, what did she just say?” One verse on “Normalize” has Abaya falsettoing a list of, uh, unsavory conditions (“Euthanasia / Homophobia / Hemophilia / Diphtheria”) without explanation. The chorus of “Piss Artist” sounds straight from the mouth of Talk That Talk-era Rihanna (“Super naughty / We love to party / Just gettin’ started”), surrounded by stoned, you-had-to-be-there sprechgesang ramblings about pissing in jars at a house party—a story Abaya told me is “one-hundred-percent true.” Recommending Switcheroo sometimes feels like telling a friend, “Yeah, it’s a kids’ show, but it looks really cool and there are some jokes in there that only adults will get!” Abaya sums up her “Gelliverse” well: “I wanted to make something that was fun and silly and not serious.”
The Gelliverse operates under the logic that anything can be a toy if you play with it. Its denizens—Gelli Haha, her band, and backup dancers Juju and Sisi Haha—are quick to make a game of each song. “Spit” is a disco tongue-twister; the live version of “Normalize” begins with the unfurling of a playground parachute before turning the gym-class game into a wearable, life-size puppet, with Gelli as its head and Juju and Sisi as the arms. The backup dancers engage in a choreographed fight, build Gelli-tall towers of blocks only to knock them down, and punctuate “Funny Music” by bonking Gelli on the head with inflatable hammers.
It’s as ridiculous as it sounds, but perhaps even more ridiculous is Abaya’s sheer vocal power. She wields her instrument with precision and feather-lightness, letting it somersault over the crowd in Polachekian disco-yodels and buoyant lilts. Like Beyoncé building breath control by singing on treadmills, or Kate Bush’s soaring, cuckoo-clock soprano, Gelli Haha’s voice bends every which way without breaking, even in the midst of a three-person trampoline routine during “Bounce House.” Watching the trio perfectly in sync at the Bowery, trading trampolines to thunderous applause, I think back to a few hours before, when Abaya joked, “I’m not a trained dancer at all, I just pretend to be.” Clearly, the (sometimes literal) jig isn’t up yet.
Accurately pitched as “Studio 54 meets Area 51,” something feels right about seeing Gelli Haha’s traveling technicolor circus in New York. After all, some of her biggest inspirations spawned here—the disco scene at Studio 54, yes, but also 1920s vaudeville and the Pyramid Club’s drag and punk nights in the ‘80s. Last time Gelli Haha played New York, she squeezed her larger-than-life show into the back room of Nightclub 101, which shares the same address as the now-defunct Pyramid Club. Its basement will host the Bowery afterparty, with Abaya herself on the decks, spinning deep into the night.
Abaya used to make music under her legal name back in her hometown of Boise, Idaho. She worked administrative, project management, and publicity jobs at a local dance company and at Treefort Festival, where she recently returned as a performer. In 2020, she received a COVID-era arts grant that funded her first EP as Angel Abaya—a record that, somewhat unbeknownst to her at the time, prophesied her next artistic chapter. “You can find a song called ‘Gelli’ on YouTube that I released at the beginning of COVID—it’s not on Spotify,” she explained. “In the song I say, ‘burn it down, start a fire, soon enough you’ll be turning into jelly.’ It’s like, what the hell?”
Gelli Haha began around 2021, shortly after Abaya moved to Los Angeles. She chose the name “because my name’s Angel and I always wanted [Gelli] to be my nickname.” As it were, the nickname didn’t stick—that is, until Abaya suggested it to her longtime collaborator Sean Guerin, followed by a nervous giggle. Thus, Abaya’s self-described “weird alien girl” persona, Gelli Haha, was born.
From there, the Gelliverse and its Haha family expanded outward to include Abaya’s backing band (nicknamed “the Gelli company”) and a pair of Thing 1 and Thing 2-esque dancers. Certain “characters” pop up throughout—Abaya’s real-life best friends Johnny and Selby are mentioned by name in the songs “Johnny,” “Piss Artist,” and “Spit.” The former appears in the music videos for “Bounce House” and standalone single “Klouds Will Carry Me To Sleep,” which Abaya calls “a transitory state” between Switcheroo and her next album.
Abaya appreciates the opportunity that Gelli Haha has given her to create a universe of her own for her compatriots to develop characters within. “I’m big on collaboration,” she says. “It’s been really special to see everyone else grow and learn things about themselves and their own artistic process.” For her, Switcheroo has been an exercise in not just trusting her instincts and getting more comfortable with improvisation. “I think I have a kind of controlling personality,” she admits. “For me, the truth comes out better when I don’t try to control it.”
Granted, that isn’t always easy. She reveals that some of the Switcheroo sessions “did end in tears, because I was not used to letting myself be imperfect or not in control.” With this new project that relies so much on playfulness and controlled chaos came a need for Abaya to let go and experiment, free from the fear of looking stupid, which was, to some degree, inevitable: “I was afraid of coming in and not knowing the right answer, and I had to quickly let that go.”
The color red, the children’s shows, and the Vaudevillian humor—they all have an air of childlike naivete and unfiltered id. “There’s an innocence to what they’re doing,” Abaya laughs. “They’re wildin’ out.” Gelli Haha became an outlet for a self-professed control freak to do the same. On “Tiramisu,” she screams like a child at the peak of a sugar high, “I wanna touch! I wanna scream! I wanna know everything!” It’s the kind of explosiveness only achievable through a delicate balance of spontaneity and refinement. “There are boundaries around what is and isn’t the Gelliverse, and within that, there aren’t any rules,” Abaya says. “We made a playground, here’s a sandbox, here are all your toys, and you can make whatever you want within this. There’s a limitlessness within the limits.” There’s also more of a willingness to embarrass yourself and let silliness reign supreme when you’ve given yourself a soft place to land.
By now, Abaya is comfortable prioritizing options and abundance over perfection. “I make a ton of demos, and we kind of cherry-pick whatever demos we like,” she says of her songwriting process. “I can make like three [demos] a day if I’m really going for it.” These demos don’t have to be perfect; they just have to exist. She has plans to return to the studio after this tour, and admits that it feels different this time around because “this time people know who we are and are expecting us to make more music.”
There’s a real innocence in how Abaya describes the process of making Switcheroo, which she chalks up to “the pleasure of not having any pressure.” When no one’s heard of your project yet, there’s room to play around without any external constraints. “I just remember telling myself, ‘This is a really special time when this is just yours.’ I didn’t really mind no one knowing about it at that time; it just meant that I had a lot of space to make it. Not that I feel a lot of pressure—or maybe I do? It’s just a different experience now because it’s not just mine. We’ve made a world, and other people live in that world now.”
Hearing Abaya describe the Gelliverse in its primordial state made me feel all the luckier to have been invited into it, to be let in on the joke. As the slow-spinning disco ball casts dotted shadows across her face, she mimed eating off a makeshift table while singing Switcheroo closer “Pluto is not a planet, it’s a restaurant,” creating a spotlit moment of internal-monologue intimacy in a packed room. Abaya may be the leader of Gelli Haha’s world, but she’s not alone in it. Sharing it with her collaborators has freed her from a prison of self-seriousness and expectation. “Just play around and you’ll find it,” she shrugs. “Or maybe you won’t, and that’s okay.”
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.