Seven years is a long time to disappear. For most artists, it is career death -- the algorithm forgets, the press cycle moves on, and whatever goodwill existed evaporates into the feed. Kelsey Lu released Blood in 2019, scored a Celine Sciamma film, contributed to projects by Solange and Skrillex, and then went quiet. Not silent -- she was composing the score for Savanah Leaf's Earth Mama, building a visual language, and apparently writing a record that features Sampha, Kamasi Washington, and Kim Gordon. The kind of guest list that does not arrive by accident.
So Help Me God is due June 12 on Dirty Hit. It is ten tracks. It is co-produced by Lu, Jack Antonoff, and Yves Rothman. And if the first two singles are any indication, it is a record that refuses to make its audience comfortable.
The Architecture of Devotion
"Portrait of a Lady on Fire" -- the second single, dropped April 9 -- is named after the Sciamma film, and the connection is not decorative. The song is a cello-embellished synth ballad built on a sinuous, capricious vocal melody. "Do you ever get like this, I wonder?" Lu repeats, mapping the vertigo of early intimacy with a precision that most love songs never attempt. The cello does not just add texture. It functions as a second voice, a counterpoint that holds the emotional register Lu's vocals are too restrained to carry alone.
The first single, "Running to Pain," arrived in late 2025 with a Savanah Leaf-directed video that Spotify featured in its Directed By series. The track leans harder into tension and release, the kind of push-pull that characterizes music made by someone who knows exactly how much to withhold. Lu's vision, according to Leaf, was "a dark fairytale styling anchored by the raw honesty of the lyrics." That description maps cleanly onto the entire project.
The Guest List as Architecture
The collaborators on So Help Me God deserve scrutiny. Sampha -- who took five years between his own first and second albums -- brings a sensibility attuned to grief and transcendence. Kamasi Washington brings the spiritual jazz weight that Lu's cello work has always orbited. Kim Gordon brings noise, texture, and the specific authority of someone who has spent four decades refusing to be domesticated by genre. And Antonoff, for all his ubiquity, has proven himself capable of restraint when the artist demands it.
This is not a committee record. These collaborators suggest a specific intention: to make something that moves between shadow and release, devotion and dissonance, without ever settling into a single register. The tracklist -- "Reaper," "Comfort," "American Sonnet," "Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost" -- reads more like a poetry collection than an album.
The Performance as Proof
Lu is playing Blue Note in New York on April 16 and 17, and Blue Note in Los Angeles on April 25 and 26. These are not arenas. They are rooms designed for proximity, for the kind of listening that demands you stop scrolling and sit with what is in front of you. In May, she will present PENUMBRA at Palazzo Diedo in Venice -- a large-scale performance work commissioned by Olivier Berggruen that blurs the lines between concert, installation, and ritual.
That trajectory -- from intimate club shows to a Venice palazzo commission in the span of a month -- tells you everything about where Kelsey Lu sees herself. She is not chasing the market. She is building a world. Whether the rest of us are ready for it is, characteristically, not her concern.
