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t’s just past noon on a Wednesday in North Hollywood, and Wisp only has a few hours left to rehearse before she leaves for a global tour the next morning. Tucked inside an unassuming rehearsal space complete with a bustling coffee shop, 21-year-old singer-songwriter Natalie Lu admits she’s nervous.
“I just really want to practice more,” says Lu on this brutally hot August afternoon. “I feel kind of scared about the newer songs that we haven’t performed yet.”
Those nerves make sense: Weeks earlier, Lu dropped her expansive debut album, If Not Winter. The follow-up to her breakthrough 2024 EP Pandora, the new full-length project is a celestial collection of shoegaze-steeped tracks featuring ethereal yet massive electric guitars and angelic pop melodies. All of it exposes deeply personal songwriting, inspired by Lu’s own journal entries.
“A lot of the album was kind of stream of consciousness for me,” Lu says, “especially because I used a lot of excerpts from my personal journal and workshopped those words into lyrics.”
Written over the course of a year and a half and recorded in Los Angeles between cups of tea and views of the mountains, Lu compares the project to a short story collection, each song melding into its own theme. Some of the tracks from Wisp’s debut have already amassed millions of streams online, with songs like “Sword,” “Breathe Onto Me,” and “Save Me Now” collectively garnering about 10 million streams on Spotify. But today, it’s the cut “Mesmerized” that has Lu wanting to get some more rehearsal time in before hitting the road.
“I have the solo at the end, and we just switched from our pedal boards to these Quad Cortexes, so I’m getting used to pushing the different buttons in comparison to just looking at my actual physical pedals and pressing them,” she says. “I’m kind of scared of the switches for tones, and just making sure I get the solo at the end of the strumming pattern while I sing is really weird and difficult for some reason. But I think I got it. I just have to practice a lot.”
Back in 2023, before she began thinking about shows or pedal boards onstage, Wisp had just posted a video of her song “Your Face” on YouTube. That set everything off: It went viral on TikTok and now has more than 145 million streams. Lu, who grew up playing violin and taught herself how to play the electric guitar, was still going to school for computer science in the Bay Area full-time, traveling back and forth between Los Angeles.
Sacha Lecca
“I started realizing I couldn’t do it when I was failing all of my finals and I had like a D in every single class,” she says. “I decided to drop out and pursue music full time. And honestly, that’s the best decision that I’ve made.”
She thinks if she were to go back to school, it would be for something music-related. “I think all of these experiences, like getting to travel and being with my band and filming music videos and getting to express myself creatively not only through music, but through creative direction as well… It’s just been so fulfilling and it’s what I wanted to do growing up, too,” she says. “I think it’s really something that I want to do for the rest of my life.”
THE PATH TO Wisp’s debut album really started to take off back in May, shortly after she got back home from her last tour. But for Lu, who’s a fan of bands like Whirr and Deftones, landing on her own sound and vision for the project took time to come together. “In the beginning stages of writing music for the album,” she says. “I didn’t really have a clear vision in mind on the narrative that I wanted to tell and kind of the broad soundscape in general, and how I wanted the album to sound.” It wasn’t until she worked with collaborators like her guitarist Max Epstein, along with producer-hyperpop artist aldn, that Lu found her answer.
“Working with [aldn], I felt this shift in my energy and the way that I approach music,” Lu says. “I was going to the studio, very excited to make music, and I think that I kind of felt myself getting very tired and stressed and anxious when I had to go to the studio. But once I met aldn, it was always like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to make music today.’ And I would wake up with so many ideas in my head, and always leave every studio session with a song. I would listen back and be like, ‘I can’t believe I made this today.’”
One of Lu’s favorite tracks on the LP barely made it onto the album. At the last minute, Lu teamed up with producer Kraus, whom she worked with on her EP, to write “Black Swan.” Underneath a wall of guitars and echoing vocals, Lu added in a voice note she recorded on her phone in her bedroom, a nod to when she first started writing music with her acoustic guitar during the pandemic.
Lu’s journal-like songwriting anchors the mythical, otherworldly atmosphere depicted on the album cover and Wisp’s viral music videos. Take one of the album’s highlights, “Sword,” which has an accompanying visual where Wisp sits in a field in a flowing white gown and dances with a set of armor before donning the metal suit herself, sword in hand, standing in front of the ocean. Much like Wisp’s other projects, the video looks like it could double as a chic fantasy series, albeit one with a cooler soundtrack.
“A lot of the creative direction from my music videos just come from things that I want to be real in the world,” Lu says. “I wish that princesses were real, and I wish that mermaids were real. I wish unicorns were real, you know? And it’s like all of my childhood fantasies, because I grew up watching a lot of movies, like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones.” She makes a lot of these themes part of her artistry. “I think that all of that really inspires my visual world because I want it to be just completely unreal. It’s really fun because I get to kind of live out my childhood fantasies when I’m on set for the music videos and that’s also a super sick feeling. So it’s like directing my own movie that I wish I acted in when I was little. I wanted to be part of the Harry Potter cast so bad. And now I’m able to kind of fulfill my fantasies.”
Sacha Lecca
WHEN WISP FINALLY hits the road for the tour, all of the songs that felt new to Lu will have become far more familiar. This time around, Lu has a front-of-house and lighting crew, and even new molded in-ears, too. “I really want it to kind of feel like you’re watching a movie and the band is like the soundtrack at the same time,” Lu says. “I think it’s really cool because I grew up going to watch ballets with my mom. I want my live set to feel similar to that, where you’re getting a full experience.”
That full live experience includes dreamlike visuals, including white lights, drapery, and keyhole and window-esque projections. Beyond finding the aesthetic for the tour, Lu explains that she’s “so pumped” about the group’s sound. “We’re getting more tight as a band,” she says. “You know, the more we play together, the better we’ll be, the more synergy we’ll have.”
Weeks after her rehearsal time in North Hollywood, Lu and the band will go on to open stadium gigs for System of a Down and Deftones. “We all grew up listening to these bands and it’s just such an honor to play alongside them,” she says. Wisp will hit stages across North America and Europe throughout the fall, including a stop in Atlanta, a city where she says she had one of her “I-made-it” moments. “That was the first time where I felt like I was super present on stage, but at the same time, it really felt like a dream. Like it didn’t feel real. [The fans] knew all of the words and they were like, moshing and crowd-surfing and I was just looking out at this crowd of people that were singing words that I wrote, and I started tearing up on stage and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is insane,’” she remembers.
After all the rehearsing at this North Hollywood practice space, after the year and a half of writing, after the TikTok stardom, Lu still wants to capture that energy. “I remember walking off of that stage that night and being like, that was the best feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
