About

KELS is an American singer and songwriter, born Kelsey Hillock in Pittsburgh and based in Atlanta. What she sings is blues and soul with country and folk running through it. She calls it dirty blues, which is where the EP got its name.

The houses

She started singing at thirteen, in opera and classical repertoire in French, Italian and Spanish, then switched to jazz once she decided it was the better fit for her voice. Her first EP, Slow Ryde, arrived in 2021: three songs, released on her birthday.

What happened next is the part she tells rather than hides. She moved from Pittsburgh to Atlanta and cleaned houses to fund the music, writing between jobs and playing anywhere that would have her, including the street. The names she gives when asked are Sarah Vaughan, Etta James, Erykah Badu, Jazmine Sullivan and Amy Winehouse, and Winehouse specifically for having written jazz and got away with it in the mainstream.

One take, in a laundromat

Her channel is the clearest statement of the method. The performances are live and in one take, filmed in places nobody films music: a car shop, a garage, a laundromat, a canyon in the middle of nowhere. No studio, no band to pay, no second attempt. It is a working method that costs almost nothing and can be repeated every week, which is the point.

"Gone" went out this way in 2025 and turned into the breakthrough, after months of posting it daily. On her own telling she promoted the one record for more than six months; the counts that came back were over a million followers and more than ten million streams. She took it out on a US tour she booked, funded and promoted herself, 52 shows by her own count, with no label and no management behind it.

Dirty Blues Princess

The EP came out on 12 June 2026: six songs, nineteen minutes, all of them hers, on KELS Music under exclusive licence to Universal Records Distribution.

1. Gone
2. Daddy's Not The One
3. 6ft Under
4. Fly On The Wall
5. Call Me
6. Worn Out Shoes

Live

She played the Atlanta Jazz Festival in Piedmont Park on 27 May 2024, an afternoon set on the day André 3000 closed the festival with New Blue Sun. In 2026 she went back to Pittsburgh to sing the national anthem at the NFL Draft, and sang it again on 5 June at Game 2 of the NBA Finals, Knicks at Spurs.

In August 2026 she took the EP to Europe: seven dates in ten days, four of them in the United Kingdom. The Deaf Institute in Manchester on the 17th, Exchange in Bristol on the 18th, and two in London, Oslo in Hackney on the 19th and Victoria Park on the 21st. After that Paradiso in Amsterdam, then Helios 37 in Cologne and Mikropol in Berlin on 25 and 26 August.

The tour carried on through North America into the autumn. The remaining dates run across the United States to the end of October 2026 and finish at Chickie Wah Wah in New Orleans on the 23rd. Dates and tickets.