Kelsey Lu

EN/ 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. 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.” Music became survival. “I documented every sunrise and every sunset,” Lu says. “It was a way to cope with whatever the fuck was going on. 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. “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.” 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.” 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.