Kelsey Lu : So Help Me God
You’d be forgiven for thinking that, for the last seven years, Kelsey Lu’s been having a ball. Since releasing their debut album in 2019, the North Carolina-born, Brooklyn-based artist has scored multiple films and art installations, modeled for Gucci, and collaborated with everyone from Debbie Harry to Yves Tumor. Yet, in the promotional write-up for their long-awaited follow-up, So Help Me God, Lu revealed that their hiatus has actually been, “a period of grief, spiritual questioning, and rebuilding after loss.”
Lu’s debut, Blood, established them as a compelling auteur within contemporary art-pop. A classically-trained cellist raised in a devoutly religious household, Lu’s songwriting offered an earthier and more organic alternative to the likes of FKA Twigs and Kelela. So Help Me God maintains Blood’s skeletal structure—starkly-mixed, interior chamber-folk—but expanded to truly cinematic proportions. With contributions from such A-Listers as Jack Antonoff, Kamasi Washington and Kim Gordon, Lu renders seven years of metamorphosis with an elemental sense of scale and turmoil.
At nearly nine minutes in length, opener “Reaper” introduces the amorphous way in which songs move throughout the entire record. Things start in a groove of neo-soul smoothness as Lu addresses a former partner with cathartic indifference: “Can’t take a sin from a sinning man/It’s not my burden, it’s in your hands.” As the track develops, however, this assuredness starts to falter. The melodies lose their moorings, fragmenting like bergs in an ice-sheet, while Lu’s lyrics slowly deteriorate into helpless devotion: “You took the pain away… You knew better.” The story seems doomed to repeat itself, bound to the same sort of mortal inertia that carries the music itself.
On the poppier end of the art-pop spectrum, lead single “Running to Pain” is an addictively abreactive standout. In both production and performance, the cues taken from Lorde’s Virgin are undeniable, but the sheer majesty of the presentation does enough to feel unique to Lu as an artist. While the lyrics depict a cycle of self-sabotage (“I keep running back to pain/It keeps me sane”), throbbing drum-machines and soaring strings crescendo the track to a state of free-running euphoria. It’s hopeful to the point of delirium; wings beating against the bars of a cage.
Throughout much of the album, Lu paints pictures of desperation and helplessness. “Portrait of a Lady On Fire” captures the heartache of infatuation (a thematic parallel to the film that inspired it), with the narrator fruitlessly searching for any sign that their feelings might be reciprocal. “What Can I Do” finds that while the selfless nature of romance is freeing, it ultimately leaves you helplessly tied to another, similar to how the song’s placid guitar is underpinned by a wave electronic uneasiness.
“American Sonnet” provides a jaw-dropping centerpiece to the record: a 7-minute, abstractly symphonic ode to Mother Earth. Built upon a simple piano pulse, the track unfurls into a biome of strings, horns, and drones. Vocally, Lu invokes their best Björk impression for a poetic rumination on the insurmountable power of Gaia’s primordial forces, a phenomenon mirrored by the heartbeat-house-rhythm which overpowers Lu in the song’s outro.
“Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost” ends the album on a monumental high of emotion. The euphoria is manic, like gasps of air taken after breaking the water’s surface. After trawling the depths of pain, Lu is ready to decapitate their ghosts and move on to something greater. Ultimately, for all the grief and strife that it contains, So Help Me God is a record about actualization—a labor of self-love, and the bitter toil it takes to find wholeness in oneself.
Label: Dirty Hit
Year: 2026
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Kelsey Lu : So Help Me God
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