Gelli Haha is the musical performance art project of Angel Abaya, a Los Angeles based singer, songwriter, and dancer who adopted the new moniker to accompany her 2025 album, Switcheroo. (Apropos!)
She's currently burning up the road on tour across the US and Canada, and audiences cannot get enough.
Take a look at the antics that accompany her band's performances, no matter where they land; floating dolphins, boxing shorts, choreographed dance moves and general chaos, a big wired up modular synth, costumes, props, and outfits galore!
See her continuing tour dates below, and follow Gelli Haha on Bandsintown.
What's Going on Here?
Gelli Haha’s command of the live stage feels both like "Art Pop's" next evolution and a throwback to its weirdest roots. Her unique sound has been described as:
"A space for pure creative chaos that exists somewhere between Studio 54 and Area 51. Gelli’s music thrives on duality: playful but profound, tongue-in-cheek but sincere."
Her tour is bringing her technicolor, disco-leaning art-pop world — what she calls the “Gelliverse” — to stages across the continent in a full-on performance art spectacle.
Reviews of her recent shows describe something closer to theater than a typical concert: tightly choreographed ensembles, surreal stage visuals, and a rotating cast of props that feel pulled from a child’s fever dream — bubbles, inflatable animals, circus setups, and synchronized dancers moving with near-mathematical precision.
One critic called the experience “equal parts a clown act, dystopian theatre, and clubby pop rave,” with the show unfolding like a narrative world rather than a setlist. It's giving vibes of a stage space long forgotten, but never abandoned, and one that we're in need of more than ever now.
+Read more: "A New Crop of Music Festivals Is Selling Adults Back Their Childhoods"
Channeling the History of Art Pop Performance
If it looks like Gelli Haha is channeling Devo and Talking Heads and Lady Gaga and the Teletubbies all at once, you're definitely in the right queue. The show she's put together for this tour is intended to invoke a nostalgic past that's shared inter-generationally.
Every movement, prop, and costume is part of a constructed universe, using the language of the stage that has been written by these artists and cultural experiences which preceded her:
- Talking Heads' social and societal awkwardness morphed into choreography and character in Stop Making Sense.
- Devo's danceable repetition and worker uniforms as punk critique on consumer culture.
- Lady Gaga's weaponized theatricality as pop spectacle and identity-shifting politics, inspired by Madonna.
Gelli Haha pulls from all of it.
And she's also putting forth a new, indie spin, meant for intimate spaces and communal comings together. Her vision is filtered through a more chaotic, playful, and internet-native lens; spurred on by influences spanning vaudeville, slapstick humor, Club Kids-era New York, and flapper-era theatrical liberation, all mashed into a hyper-synthetic pop environment.
On that note...
Can We Talk About "World Building?"
There’s also something timely about the tone of Gelli Haha’s performance; it's incredibly "of the now." Her music leans into disco and synth-pop, which draw on the very trendy current obsession with nostalgia, but the delivery is intentionally unserious — absurd, exaggerated, almost cartoonish.
It's a performance that begs to be seen live. Absurdity, when done right is memorable. And that's part of the point of building this world, to get you out of your other world of imprisonment: your phone.
Live concerts are once again becoming reframed as spaces for active immersion and participation, as opposed to the dominant contemporaneous engagement with musical art, which is streamlined (see: "streaming") for passive listening.
Attention is basically a currency at this point, and one that's become so deflated and fragmented that for an artist asking their audience for it, they need to give folks even more of a reason to look up from the screen than ever before. A lot of that naturally happens in the context of performance, although it doesn't always have to.
Ian Temple of Soundfly wrote about "world building" on his Substack, Soundfly Weekly. First Ian defines what that term means, it's: "the art of crafting an internally coherent set of rules, environments, and systems for a creative work, be it art, fiction, video game, comic, music, or something else."
He goes on to talk about its applications in music and how that's such an untapped resource for creating a way in for audiences. Here's him explaining why that matters for artists:
"I realized the other day that lots of the music I find most moving does this, whether consciously or not. It immerses you in something new and different. It hints at the existence of something deeper and carries you off toward the infinite, toward imagined realities and dream lands. It unearths hidden things and unknown things and impossible things — and the possibility that those things are actually all around you every day in your waking life."
Absurdity is fun, dancing around in boxing shorts, pointing flashlights is fun. We don't need a reason to want to play in that world, we can just walk in. It can be part of our every day.
What I love about the way Gelli Haha is ripping through the continent, delighting all who stand in her path, is that her version of this is totally budget-friendly, and accessible. And it's scalable because of that. These are small rooms, relatively, yet reviewers have been noting the gigs feel “like a big show” because of how tightly choreographed and conceptually unified everything is.
We always talk about how expensive touring has gotten. This tour has been showing fans, artists, and the industry that you don't need to spend a lot in order to have a good time. Actually, no, it's that we all deserve to have a good time. One that doesn't require refreshing the ticketing page a hundred times just to spend $400 on a concert ticket.
Right now, fans need worlds to step into. The artists who write their stage as if it's a narrative space — multi-sensorial, aspirational, and whimsical — and totally buy in to that creation, are not just entertaining audiences but inviting them to join.
Gelli Haha builds worlds of fun, and you're all invited to play.
Gelli Haha 2026 Tour Dates
MAY 07 — Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
MAY 10 — Austin, TX @ Antone's
MAY 11 — Dallas, TX @ Dada Dallas
MAY 15-17 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Block Party 2026
MAY 19 — San Diego, CA @ Voodoo Room at the House of Blues
MAY 20 — Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room
JUN 09 — Berlin, Germany @ Kantine am Berghain
JUN 13 — Paris, France @ La Boule Noire
JUN 14 — Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands @ Best Kept Secret 2026
JUN 17 — London, United Kingdom @ Hoxton Hall
AUG 08 — Garden City, ID @ Visual Arts Collective (VAC)
