Kelsey Lu: “I move at my own pace”

Kelsey Lu has always done things their own way, following their instincts rather than sticking to a set path.

The South Carolina-born, Los Angeles-based cellist, composer and singer first started turning heads with a cover of 10cc’s ‘I’m Not in Love’, later featured in HBO’s Euphoria season one.

Their 2019 debut Blood followed soon after and was a record that mesmerised through its blend of art-pop, classical elements and R&B.

Since then, Lu has kept themselves busy: scoring films and documentaries, such as the 2023 BAFTA-winning Earth Mama, contributing to a Neneh Cherry tribute, and staging performance work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And now, seven years on, So Help Me God arrives, a record that feels like a collection of pieces finally finding each other in the same room at the same time.

On ‘American Sonnet’, Lu reimagines a poem by late civil-rights activist Wanda Coleman, stripping back the grandiosity found elsewhere on the album to piano and strings alone. In contrast, opener ‘Reaper’, originally written as a 20-minute piece, acts as a hypnotic, drifting introduction to Lu.

It wasn't just the music that evolved over time, the lyrics often shifted with it.

“’852’, specifically,” they say. “I originally wrote it as ‘I should’ve been loved’ or ‘how I should have been loved’. At the time I was in this narcissistic haze […] Later on I realised, actually the opposite—that’s not how I should ever have been loved in that way. Ever.”

“And towards the end I just started punching in, changing ‘should’ to ‘should not’.”

These changes are what make So Help Me God’s identity, they’re part of its fabric.

Lu worked with a variety of people on the record, most notably Jack Antonoff, who’s best known for his work with Taylor Swift.

“It was really great, we had so much fun,” they say. “ I think it's really important for me to be able to have a lot of space. To sit with things and react to them, and a lot of that space was really nicely given. We just nerded out on stuff.”

The idea of “pockets” is central to the album’s character. Instead of a straightforward stream of consciousness, it's more like a set of ideas that are repeatedly revisited, reshaped, and reframed over time.

“It’s definitely not linear,” Lu says about the making of the album. “Some of these songs, like ‘What Can I Do’, I wrote maybe a decade ago, and then they just kind of lived in different pockets over the years.”

“I think of them like conceptual memory banks,” they explain. “These dreams from like seven years ago, picking different pockets over the years.”

The seven-year gap between their two records is both deliberate and incidental. Lu has framed it as a kind of resistance to industry pressure, while rejecting any fixed timeline altogether.

“I move at my own pace,” Lu says. “This is the pace that it took me to make this [record]. I don’t know if I’m gonna take this long for the next album, maybe the next album will come out in a month.”

"The current system doesn't allow people to just kind of sit and process what they're experiencing."

The album moves through devotion, collapse, longing and rupture, without ever settling on a clean resolution. It’s not a new direction for them, but here it feels more inward-looking and self-interrogating.

This might explain why some listeners have called it a breakup record. Lu doesn’t reject that, but doesn’t seem fully agree either.

“I mean, sure,” they say. “There’s definitely breakup moments, definitely ‘fuck you’ moments, definitely ‘I’m free’ moments, but it was worked on over such a long period of time. There were like mini breakups happening throughout the seven years of making it.”

Lu grew up with two strict Jehovah’s Witness parents, a faith they say they left behind when they turned 18. Asked whether there is a connection between their religious upbringing and the questions they are asking on this record, they say:

“Yeah, I mean, it’s all connected. It’s all part of the same string. I think this one is more about my spirituality and my relationship with myself,” Lu explains.

“Blood, my last album, dealt much more with my parents, but this is more about my relationship with myself, toxic relationships I’ve had, love relationships I’ve had over the past seven years, and sort of contending with my relationship with music, which, for me, has been like God — this ultimate being and purpose. It’s about my relationship with myself and spirituality.”

So, does So Help Me God close a chapter or open a new one for Kelsey Lu? In their usual fashion, it’s more nuanced than that.

“I think they go hand in hand,” they say.

• So Help Me God is out now