Kelsey Lu – Comfort
Kelsey Lu’s first album since 2019’s Blood is called So Help Me God, and it arrives June 12 via Dirty Hit. “Comfort” is the fourth single, following “Running To Pain”, the title track, and “Better Than That” featuring Sampha. Co-produced by Jack Antonoff, Yves Rothman and Casey MQ, with contributions elsewhere on the record from Sampha, Kamasi Washington and Kim Gordon, this is a bigger production apparatus than anything she’s worked with before, and the album’s scope seems to match.
“Comfort” earns its runtime through patience. Lu’s voice opens the track suspended above a sparse, hushed arrangement, holding back almost entirely in its first half, and then the production begins to gather beneath it. Layers build, the sound widens, and by the end the track has moved somewhere denser and more exposed without ever abandoning its restraint. It’s a structural approach she seems to be applying to the whole record. The lyrics circle a specific kind of exhaustion: too many voices in the head to find her own, the sun rotting before her eyes, a distrust of men who perform paternal authority, inherited wounds described as a bloody scene. The search for comfort is the through-line, but the song never arrives at it cleanly, which is the point. Lu describes it plainly: “the desire for rest, clarity, and refuge, amidst confusion, inherited traumas, and a distorted authority. A perfect storm of restlessness.”
Earlier this month Lu wrapped an eight-night Blue Note residency across New York and Los Angeles, where the album’s material made its live debut. She also presented PENUMBRA, an immersive performance work at Palazzo Diedo in Venice, commissioned alongside Olivier Berggruen. A companion short film directed by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Savanah Leaf and starring Garance Marillier has been developed with the album. So Help Me God is framed as a unified work across all of these forms. Seven years is a long time to wait, and so far everything suggests it was worth it.
