Kelsey Lu

About this event

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…