Kelsey Lu grew up Jehovah’s Witness and named her second album So Help Me God

Seven years is a long time to sit with grief and call the result So Help Me God. Kelsey Lu’s second album arrives on Dirty Hit as a document of personal reconstitution and an object of genuine formal ambition. Baroque chamber pop co-produced with Jack Antonoff, featuring Sampha and Kamasi Washington, it opens with an eight-minute track called “Reaper” that takes its time arriving at whatever it intends to say.

When Blood appeared, Lu had already spent years as a session musician for Solange, Florence + The Machine, and Blood Orange. A cello-forward avant-pop artist whose debut felt like an arrival from a world mainstream pop hadn’t mapped yet, she took a long gap before returning with a statement this resolved. The Jack Antonoff co-production credit is the first surprise: his name is associated with maximal pop precision, and the combination sounds like a deliberate risk.

The album’s architecture is cinematic in a specific sense: layered without being cluttered, with saxophones, piano, and strings circling what Apple Music calls a subtle electronic heartbeat. The lead single “Running to Pain” addresses what Lu identifies as addictive relationship cycles, the pattern of returning to what hurts despite knowing better. “Better Than That,” featuring Sampha, chronicles the decision to walk away. The sequencing from one to the other is deliberate in a way that rewards patience.

The album title deserves its own accounting. Lu grew up in a strict Jehovah’s Witness household, left that world, and has built an art practice around interrogating those exits. “So Help Me God” is a phrase from the secular oath: something you say to bind a promise to consequence. Lu uses it to title an album about rebuilding after the kind of personal collapse that doesn’t have a clean finish line, and the tension between the religious echo and the secular use is structural to how the record works.

The skepticism here is about reach rather than quality. The album isn’t on Spotify, and with no European or Latin American tour dates, international discovery depends almost entirely on Dirty Hit’s own ecosystem. Last.fm logs a modest listener count for an artist with this level of critical praise and this caliber of collaborators. Lu’s work has always lived at the intersection of art practice and pop music, and So Help Me God extends that position rather than attempting to abandon it. Listeners outside the experimental-pop world will need to find their way to it.

Critics have responded with near-uniform enthusiasm: The Skinny rates it 5/5 and calls it “a stunning celebration of the complexities of existence.” “Cutting Off the Head of a Ghost” closes the record in a way that suggests Lu is done negotiating with the material; the album’s arc from vulnerability to release is present in the sequencing even when ambiguous in the lyrics.

So Help Me God is out now through Dirty Hit. The North American tour runs through this summer, and the live sets will show quickly whether Lu has found a way to perform an album this intimate at scale.

Tags: 2026, art pop, chamber pop, experimental pop, Kelsey Lu, So Help Me God