Kelsey Lu: The Composer and Gucci Star On Her New Music

The cellist, singer, and Gucci star on staying grounded in her creative process and how slowing down is an act of rebellion.

A dark sensuality pulses through Gucci’s 2025 We’ll Always Have London cruise campaign, which cuts a romantically moody image of the British capital across chic vignettes—a crimson-clad bar, the back seat of a black cab—via the photo legend Nan Goldin’s fixed lens. That same sultry atmosphere colors the music of one of the campaign’s stars: the cellist and vocalist Kelsey Lu. The North Carolina native’s classically inspired avant-pop sound gained her a following amid a community of talents on the experimental scene of the late 2010s, which saw her opening for Wet on tour, dropping her haunting 2016 EP, Church, and debuting her brooding, sonically lush studio album Blood three years later. “When you listen to my music, you’re diving into yourself,” Lu says. “It’s not surface music. It will take you on a journey—all kinds of flavors. It’s a million-layer cake.”

Her multilayered confections have led to collaborations with Solange, Kelela, and Blood Orange, though Lu’s ascent to such a tier was not without its hardships; like plenty of the greats, she has lived many lives. Lu was raised in a family of devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and later worked as a stripper and weed dealer and squatted in a Hoboken leather factory during more dire financial times. To be wrapped in Gucci on set for a glossy editorial due to all that hustle is not lost on the millennial.

“I find musicality in the rhythms of his collections,” Lu says of Gucci’s Sabato De Sarno, whom she credits with treating music not as an afterthought but as a proper component of his work’s presentation. Though her style oscillates wildly between laid-back and high drama based on the vibe of any given day, on the afternoon of our interview she finds herself again in Gucci: a black tank top, the lounging-at-home in Brooklyn counterpart to her ultra-glam shoot persona.

Lu is a fan of costumes. Her favorite NYC thrift (the name of which she frustratingly gatekeeps) specializes in old ensembles from opera performances. She finds herself playing multiple characters for our shoot, among them “one free and euphoric, one that was like Monica Vitti in an Antonioni film, one very sexy and a little dark,” she says. “Finding the erotic and sensuality of self is something that I’ve been exploring and working on.”

Listeners might conjure a soulful, ethereal picture of Kelsey Lu the musician from the playful Donna Summer-meets-Lana Del Rey sound of her track Poor Fake and the dreamy aching of Morning Dew, which is an image that translates rather neatly to Kelsey Lu the person. She’s radically vulnerable, openly discussing a foggy melancholy that has enveloped her since the new year; she waxes philosophical on shadow work, astrology, and the need for a reflective pause amid the rush back from the pandemic; she pauses to gather her words and is so dedicated to honesty that she asks for another chat the day after our first to ensure that she has represented herself genuinely.

She considers being true to her vision an act of rebellion against an industry that demands she forge forward at all costs and produce[ITALS] at all times. In the past two years, she has scored two films, Earth Mama and Daughters, both festival darlings about heartbreaking issues affecting Black women and girls, including the foster-care system, drug addiction, and incarceration. But she is playing her cards close to her chest regarding new music on the horizon. Lu notes it’s a time of great clarity compared to her prior eras, and for now she’s embracing experimentation in solitude, sowing the fertile ground that will yield beautiful sounds in her own time.

“Whether I take five years or five months to create the next thing, that’s on me,” she says. “Ultimately I’m behind myself. This time between Blood and now is me tuning into my intuition, trusting myself, and building a team to support that.”