Gelli Haha's Art-First Playbook

Before we get into Gelli Haha specifically, here's something worth sitting with, especially if your reaction to "art project artist" is "cool, but that's not me, I'm trying to make money."

One of the things I keep coming back to lately is why so many artists feel like they're getting diminishing returns from their content. And a big part of the answer is this: if you're showing up on the timeline playing acoustic guitar in your bedroom, going "hi, this is my song," you sound exactly like a POV of finding a new indie artist who smokes weed and makes chill tunes. We've been watching people do that for six years. The scroll knows that format. It keeps moving.

The timeline reset doesn't have to mean a giant clown suit. It doesn't have to mean a full art project with a concept and a diorama. It can just mean entering in a different way — even something as simple as a strong color grade that makes someone go "thank God, something that doesn't look like the other thousand things I just scrolled past." That's the bar. Fresh enough to feel good.

That's why Gelli Haha is worth studying regardless of where your music sits. She's an extreme case of the principle, but the principle applies to everyone.

Who they are

Gelli Haha is the project of Angel Abaya, an LA-based (originally Boise, Idaho) artist who makes synth-pop art music in collaboration with producer Sean Guerin of De Lux. If you're trying to place the sonic/aesthetic category — think Magdalena Bay, Bjork, Kate Bush. It's what we'd call an art project: there's a world, there's a character, there's a system of visuals that runs through everything.

She's on Innovative Leisure, which is worth knowing about. It's an LA-based indie with a serious alumni list — Bass Drum of Death, Jim-E Stack (the producer behind work with Charli XCX, HAIM, Lorde, and others), BadBadNotGood, Classixx. Having a label like that behind you is a real launch advantage, similar to what we talked about with Ninja Tune — it's not a shortcut, but it's a better starting position than going it completely alone.

With that said, the interesting stuff here isn't about the label. It's about the specific things they're doing.

The growth

Gelli Haha's chart tracking started in April 2025. Her first single, "Bounce House," dropped on March 19, 2025. Three more singles followed, leading into the album Switcheroo, which came out June 27, 2025, on LP, CD, and digital. The release structure was a clean single waterfall into the LP, and notably, she used the same artwork across all four singles. That's something a lot of artists stress about unnecessarily. You don't have to create a different asset for every single. It's an option, not a requirement.

In about ten months, she went from zero tracked streaming data to a peak of 160,000 monthly Spotify listeners, sitting around 111,000 at the time of recording. That's a real number, built fast.

The YouTube concept

One of you tipped me off to this during a consult session, and it's worth breaking down because it's legitimately one of the better YouTube content ideas I've seen in a while.

For Switcheroo, Gelli Haha and her team built out a concept called the Gelliverse — a diorama of a house where each room corresponds to a different song on the album. They animated her dancing through each room and released individual videos for each one. Each video is a different room. Same diorama, different rooms, broken out into separate pieces of content.

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