Kelsey Lu

It’s been seven years since Kelsey Lu released their debut album Blood, a baroque, cello-led exorcism that introduced a singular voice moving between the sacred and the sensual. Seven years after the release of their debut album Blood, a baroque, cello-led exorcism that introduced a singular voice moving between the sacred and the sensual, Kelsey Lu returns with So Help Me God. Due June 2026 via Dirty Hit, the 10-track album is Lu’s most fearless and fully realised work to date. Co-produced by Lu, Jack Antonoff and Yves Rothman and mixed by Oli Jacobs, features contributions from Sampha, Kamasi Washington,Lady Jess and Kim Gordon. It is not a healing record. It is a reckoning. Across its ten songs, Lu traces a landscape of transformation — where devotion, desire, grief and transcendence collapse into one another. “A lot has happened in the past seven years, a lot of healing and growth,” Lu says. “But this isn’t really a healing album. It’s more of a reckoning. It’s about facing the parts of myself I tried to move past, and realizing they were still shaping everything. This album is me standing in that truth instead of trying to transcend it.” If Blood was an introduction - lush, devotional, orchestral - So Help Me God is an arrival. Harder. Hungrier. Willing to sit in the dark. In 2020, during a residency at Palm Heights,, Lu set up a studio on the first day, ready to begin again. When they reached for the only cello they had ever owned for the past 20 years, it cracked in their hands. “It felt really symbolic,” they recall. “I went into a deep mourning state. It holds memories. It holds energy. And suddenly, that was gone.” The world outside was collapsing too. It was the early months of COVID. Borders closed. Flights cancelled. Lu was stranded on the island - strict lockdown laws meant stepping outside could mean fines or jail time; helicopters and drones circled overhead while police cars patrolled the streets. Music became survival. Each morning before sunrise, Lu would slip out, sometimes hopping a fence into the grounds of an abandoned structure to film the dawn. Each evening they documented the sunset, sharing the moments online in a series that became HYDROHARMONIA - a daily ritual of sound and image meant to counter the dread and endless doomscrolling of that moment. “I documented every sunrise and every sunset,” Lu says. “It was a way to cope with whatever the fuck was going on.” *add onto the end of this quote* "My instinctual drive and method of survival was to turn to nature and the only other thing I've ever known to keep me alive, music." What followed were years of movement - London, upstate New York, Indonesia, Los Angeles - and a spiritual deep dive through reiki, dreamwork, plant medicine, breathwork and water cleansing ceremonies. Relationships dissolved and reformed. Faith collapsed and reassembled in new shapes. They stepped away from the major label system. Isolation became both a wound and teacher. *i think adding a before wound gives it a slightly softer feel* “Reckoning with the fact that I’ve felt isolated and alone for most of my life,” Lu reflects. “Making this record has been crawling out of that well.” That sense of emergence runs through So Help Me God. Sonically, it is meticulous and cinematic - light and shadow moving across drum & bass pulses, distorted guitars, choral swells and dark electronic textures. There are echoes of post-punk austerity, devotional minimalism and flashes of arena-scale pop. In Los Angeles, Lu connected with Rothman before later expanding the collaboration with Antonoff. Initially hesitant after past experiences with high-profile male producers, Lu found something different here: play. “I knew it was right when I was under the hood of the piano with a paintbrush on the strings and he was at the drums with another paintbrush,” Lu says. “It was in that moment when I realized how much I missed that kind of connection - playtime and collaboration.” That spirit of communion ripples across the album. On opener “Reaper,” Gordon, Antonoff, Zem Audu, Lady Jess and Washington weave saxophone, violin and shredded guitar into something feral and ecstatic. A children’s choir in Rome rises on “Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost,” originally written with Patrick Wimberly for Arcane — a moment of queer tenderness refracted into something mythic. Lead single “Running To Pain” is devotional and dangerous at once: a cry to God for the thing you know will undo you. “When I fall back on my knees and I can’t let go / when that look of desperation calls out my name,” Lu sings. Visually, Lu drew inspiration from the stark chiaroscuro of Caravaggio - bodies emerging from darkness, divinity rendered in flesh and bruise. That same tension animates the music: on “Only the Lonely,” Lu’s voice slices through urgent, drum & bass-inspired production. “I disagree with the way that you loved me,” they sing. On “Portrait of a Lady On Fire,” inspired by the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, longing burns slow and incandescent. Born in North Carolina and based in New York City, Lu has long moved fluidly between sound, image, healing and performance, expanding the possibilities of contemporary artistry. A composer as much as a songwriter, their work includes original scores for Netflix’s award-winning documentary Daughters and A24’s BAFTA-winning Earth Mama, alongside commissions across fashion and film. Their creative universe spans collaborations with visionaries such as Yves Tumor, Jamie xx, Debbie Harry and Skrillex, alongside artistic partnerships with Nan Goldin, Wu Tsang and Jacolby Satterwhite, and brands including Gucci, Miu Miu and Bottega Veneta. The project also unfolds visually through a collaborative sequence of short films inspired by So Help Me God. The album is accompanied by a short film created in collaboration with BAFTA-award-winning director Savanah Leaf, starring French actor Garance Marillier with official photography by Yuma Al-Arashi. Together, the record and film form a single narrative work, reinforcing Lu’s position at the intersection of music, fine art and culture. “I disappeared for a while, even from myself,” Lu says. “There was a lot of grieving. But on the other side of that, I found people again. I found play again.” So Help Me God does not offer easy answers. It offers something braver: surrender. It begins in fracture and moves toward something harder won: connection.