When Kelsey Lu sought a backdrop for the short film accompanying their second album, they landed on Lanzarote, a mountainous island in the Canary Islands of Spain. Blackened with volcanic rock and encircled by towering waves, the tumultuous scenery makes a vivid psychic landscape for So Help Me God, a rambling spell of ’70s-era soul and exuberant orchestral folk-pop that sweeps through the fog of heartbreak and the clarity of self-discovery. Filled with lyrics that figure the world as place both vast and small, the album is the kind of monument to deeply felt emotion that fans of Ana Roxanne, Solange, Weyes Blood, and Fiona Apple will hold close to their chest.
So Help Me God arrives seven years after the release of Lu’s debut, Blood, a chamber-pop album that charted their move to Los Angeles and their departure from their strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. In that time, the classically trained cellist, producer, and singer-songwriter has scored two films, Daughters and Earth Mama, blanketing the woody sound of their cello with warm ripples of drone and synthesizer. They also had time to experience life. So Help Me God’s songs unfurl across five, seven, and even eight minutes, speaking on the perils of not knowing oneself, feeling suffocated by a dead-end relationship, and coaxing out the will to do better. “This process, for me, has been about taking time to reconnect with myself, to trust myself, my decisions, my intuition, and my gut,” they recently told The Creative Independent. And time they took. For the better part of a decade, they moved through some toxic relationships—some with themself—then tended the scars.
Co-produced by Jack Antonoff with contributions from Kim Gordon and Kamasi Washington, the record bristles with the conflict between knowing what’s best for you and knowing that what you’re seeing right in front of you isn’t it. Lu expresses all this with poetic wisdom, but they don’t wag fingers. Spinning out across the chunky 808s on “Running to Pain,” they sing, “When that look of desperation calls out my name/I forget how much it hurts me every time,” acknowledging how a harmful pattern can sometimes feel binding. On “852,” showered with violin swells that sound like a grueling comedown, Lu admits to holding onto pain longer than they’d like. Like the “don’t you cry, baby” message of Solange’s anthemic “Cranes in the Sky,” these are ballads for survival capable of making solitude feel a little less alone.
Steeped in languor, the arrangements are as mercurial as Lu’s lyricism as they chase new mental states with anthropological curiosity. There’s a wild, Venusian flow to “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” which summons the passion and tragedy that suffused the namesake 2019 film’s central romance. Lu’s elastic vocals are suspended into a celestial soprano beside whining strings as they intone the words “burning desire” and bellow, “Do you want to get like this?/I wonder.” In “American Sonnet 18,” they transform a poem originally written by Los Angeles poet Wanda Coleman as an homage to June Jordan into a song of their own. Framed by death-marching piano chords and wailing cello, they survey a dark but also wonderful terrain of Black femmehood, surrendering to “mountains of flesh,” “ancient rhymes,” and writhing “black things.” As a gust of wind crackles and rumbles, opening into a muted pulse of faraway techno, you get the sense that pain, rage, and ecstasy are all portals into one another.
As a teenager, Lu once jumped out of a window to escape the grip of their religious family. Since then, they’ve devoted multiple creative projects to working through their relationship with God. On this album, God is no longer a threat; God is a presence in everyone and everything, one that allows them to forge ahead when life feels cruel. On the album’s monumental closer, “Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost,” triumphant bass saunters into a confetti burst of ’80s-inspired pop as Lu trudges their way to the other side of another heartbreak. “Keys of life/Make peace with/Parting seas/Embrace the/Fears, the tears,” they sing, sounding a note of euphoria even amid exhaustion and struggle. It embodies a core lesson of So Help Me God, and much of Lu’s catalog: Emotion is divine, pain as well as joy, and the harder we feel, the closer we get to understanding our inner truth.
