KELSEY LU

ABOUT this week’s guest:

Cellist, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Kelsey Lu was born into an artistic and strictly religious Jehovah’s Witness family in North Carolina. In their late teens they left home to pursue music at University of North Carolina School for the Arts, but soon dropped out in favor of playing with local bands. Their path would soon lead them to New York City, where they quickly became an in-demand collaborator with luminaries such as Kelela, Blood Orange, Jamie xx, and Solange, while coming into their own as a solo artist using looping pedals and their cello as their backing instrument. This year marks the 10th anniversary of their critically hailed 2016 debut ep Church followed by their full length, and major label debut Blood in 2019. Since then, they put out an album of remixes called Blood Transfusion, a series of singles, including a 2020 collaboration with Yves Tumor, and a series of immersive meditative soundscapes and visuals called Hydroharmonia. Lu has always been a visionary creative, with a singular voice, and a genre-bending force of nature, and now at long last they are back with their first album in seven years, So Help Me God, which arrived with a gorgeous short film of the same name and series of visuals for half of the albums songs, all which bring the listener into an immersive world of elemental and emotional landscapes that only Kelsey Lu could create. The week after its release, we met up with Lu for an in depth conversation about the journey from their last studio release to So Help Me God, recorded in front of a live audience at Bang & Olufsen’s beautiful Midtown showroom, as part of New York Music Month.

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