Eight years after their first show at Le Guess Who?, and seven after the release of debut album Blood—a baroque, cello-led exorcism that introduced a singular voice moving between the sacred and the sensual—Kelsey Lu returns with the long-awaited new record So Help Me God.
The 10-track album is Lu’s most fearless and fully realized work to date, featuring contributions from Sampha, Kamasi Washington, Lady Jess and Kim Gordon. Across ten songs, Lu traces a landscape of transformation—where devotion, desire, grief and transcendence collapse into one another.
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. The world outside was collapsing too. 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.
What followed were years of movement and a spiritual deep dive through reiki, dreamwork, plant medicine, breathwork and water cleansing ceremonies. Relationships dissolved and reformed. Faith collapsed and reassembled in new shapes. That sense of emergence runs through So Help Me God. Sonically, it is meticulous and cinematic—light and shadow moving across drum & bass pulses, distorted guitars, choral swells and dark electronic textures. There are echoes of post-punk austerity, devotional minimalism and flashes of arena-scale pop. So Help Me God does not offer easy answers. It offers something braver: surrender. It begins in fracture and moves toward something harder won: connection.
Kelsey Lu performs at Le Guess Who? 2026 on Saturday, 7 November. Also performing are a.o. Tainá e i o u, Juana Molina, Ángeles Toledano and many more.
Photography by Yumna Al-Arashi
