Kelsey Lu on Dirt, Diotima, Deluxe Dreams, and Their New Album, ‘So Help Me God’
“I feel like I’ve grown so much into myself in terms of knowing what I want and don’t want, and building my intuition,” Lu says.
Reported by Vogue.
Kelsey Lu has never made music that fits neatly anywhere, and So Help Me God — their sophomore album, out now — isn't about to start. Seven years after Blood, the 35-year-old artist arrives with something bigger, stranger, and more deliberately crafted: a project that exists equally as sound, film, and visual installation. According to Vogue, Lu describes the gap between albums less as a creative evolution and more as a personal excavation — shedding toxic relationships, including the one they had with themselves, and finally trusting their own instincts.
The collaborators alone signal the album's ambition. Kamasi Washington, Sampha, and Kim Gordon all appear, and each connection runs deeper than a studio session. Lu met Sampha while recording Blood in London; one of their first UK shows was a split bill with both Sampha and Kamasi. Gordon entered the picture in 2017 after approaching Lu post-performance in LA — and years later, when Lu ran into her at Zebulon and asked if she remembered them, she did. Gordon ended up recording over a cello composition Lu had dashed off in frustration during a bad studio day: raw, "nicely boisterous," and ultimately woven into the album's accompanying film rather than the record itself. Strings across the project come courtesy of Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Lu's own sister. Everyone on this album is tethered to memory.
Longing as a Creative Force
The emotional core of the album traces back to Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Lu watched it three times in a row during pandemic lockdown, alone and then with their girlfriend at the time — a new relationship formed on an island while the world outside felt ruptured. The film's specific ache, that sense of wanting something just out of reach, became the temperature Lu wanted to hit. They already work cinematically; Sciamma gave them a target.
The live performances have matched that visual ambition. Recent shows in LA and New York featured multiple looks per night — Diotima gowns, sequins, a Liza Minnelli wig — and two sets an evening at the Blue Note. But the most extraordinary moment happened in Venice, where Lu and collaborators took over the entire top floor of the Palazzo Diedo, filled it with soil, and performed among charcoal paper works buried underneath, activated in real time as the audience moved through the space with them. Lu's response to being asked if that's hard to replicate on tour? A new rider demand: one bag of dirt per show.
When an artist thinks in installations and writes lyrics like "You are the reaper left to decide / What you want, baby? I'm not your guide," the album is almost beside the point — the whole world they're building is the work.
Read the original at Vogue.
