Kelsey Lu’s highly anticipated debut album, Blood, is out on Columbia Records.
To celebrate the release, Lu will play two sold-out headline shows at Los Angeles’ Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Further shows are slated for Arizona’s FORM Festival, San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, Berlin’s Berghain, London’s Kings Place, Brooklyn’s Afropunk Festival and several dates in Japan this summer.
Lu recently played one of the inaugural performances at long-awaited New York venue The Shed as part of Soundtrack To America, a special project in partnership with Steve McQueen and Quincy Jones. The Wall Street Journal hailed her performance as “incantatory.”
Lu made Blood with Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Sampha, Kanye West) as well as additional production from Jamie xx on “Why Knock for You” and “Foreign Car,” Adrian Younge on “Blood” and Skrillex on “Due West.” Blood also features work from Lu’s sister, the violinist Jessica McJunkins.
Previously released singles are receiving widespread acclaim with Pitchfork calling “Due West” Lu’s “most arresting excursion yet.” Noisey hails “Blood” as “dreamy pop…the sort of vocals you want to swim in,” while The FADER proclaims Lu’s cover of 10cc’s classic “I’m Not In Love” is “meditative, oscillating between ambient and familiar.” Blood is Lu’s first project in three years since the critically acclaimed Church EP released on True Panther.
A vocalist, cellist and producer, Lu left her Charlotte, North Carolina home at 18 to study cello at the prestigious University of North Carolina School of the Arts. She spent several years traveling, including a stint in a squat in Hoboken, NJ, and is now based in Los Angeles. Lu has collaborated and shared stages with the likes of Jamie xx, Florence +the Machine, Solange, Sampha, Blood Orange, Mariah Carey, Skrillex, Oneohtrix Point Never, Sampha, and many more. Beyond music, her collaborators across film and fashion have included Gucci, Jil Sander, Kahlil Joseph and Kenzo, Jil Sander, Sean Frank, Grace Wales Bonner, Telfar, No Sesso, Come Tees and Total Luxury Spa. In the past year, Lu graced the cover of The Beat, Crack and V Magazine.
