Wisp is proof the internet can still make rock stars

Lu burst onto the scene an unknown, a computer science student in San Francisco who fell into fame after a clip of a song she’d recorded in her spare time went viral. If not winter builds on that early momentum and shows that shoegaze’s heir apparent is here to stay.

A longtime fan of bands like Slowdive, Deftones, Cocteau Twins, and Whirr (her handle is @whirrwhoreforlyfe), Wisp has gained an edge taking shoegaze and making it her own. When “Your face” blew up and she realised there was an audience for the music she wanted to make, she grabbed her chance and ran with it.

Lu parlayed that virality – with credit to the undeniable powerhouse track “Your face” – into a record deal and a career. She topped charts, played iconic bills like Flog Gnaw, and met her idols, including Whirr. “I was so scared meeting them,” she recalls and laughs. “I met them last year at Slide Away. They were there, and I was talking to my friend Alvin, who was also playing, and I was like please introduce me. He was just playing dumb, but he introduced me and I was honestly shaking. But they were so genuine and so sweet.” All this from a girl who, up until two years ago, always loved music but had entirely different plans.

“Growing up in San Francisco, there wasn’t really a big music scene to be involved around, just because I never went to shows. I went to my first show when I was 17. Growing up being so indulged in music but not involved, it was really difficult to find like-minded people or even finding people that shared the same music interest as I did,” Lu tells me.

In college, she got that first taste of musical freedom. And once the Wisp project took off, she pushed those boundaries even further with a move to L.A., where her world expanded dramatically. “Once I moved to L.A., I realized that those kinds of people were literally everywhere and all I had to do was put myself out there, open my eyes, and just wear my music on my sleeve more and not be too afraid of people judging my taste,” she explains.

So much of Wisp’s allure, after all, isn’t just her recordings but her world. Those luscious guitars are escapes as much as earworms, and her project to date has been as heavily rooted in fantasy as it has been in shoegaze or metal. Lu’s imagery often shows her in Medieval costume, embracing a knight in armour or laying like a pixie in the grass. “Being able to write music that can also be attached to a visual world, I’m able to bring my own childhood fantasies into it,” she tells me. The only kind of project she wants to make is one her inner child would have loved – the kind that draws from the stories of mythical creatures and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. “I’m kind of building out a movie set in my head.”

As she made that move, Lu released her first EP as Wisp, Pandora. The collection of six tracks leans heavily into the traditions of shoegaze and introduced Lu as an artist to the world. But with that mission statement under her belt, Lu set her sights on her next. The resulting If not winter is both a continuation of those first efforts and an expansion. Working with both longtime collaborator Max Epstein and new faces including Elliott Kozel, Gabe Greenland, and aldn, Lu’s traditional sound gets the avant-pop treatment. Welcome electronic tints are added to the layers upon layers of guitar that usually fill Lu’s mixes, around which her vocals and lyrics also come more into centre stage.

“This time around, I actually knew what I wanted to say,” Lu tells me of working on her record. “Being able to write lyrics and get things off my chest and have the urge to write not just for someone but because I’m feeling a certain way and that writing will help me is how I gathered all of this material.”

The transition from wunderkind to career artist can be fraught, at times. Some get lost in the hype, failing to find their voice inside all the noise. Others, like Wisp, go the opposite direction, leaning even more into themselves and what they think is cool, knowing that the rest will follow. With social analytics often acting as a prerequisite to record deals and big opportunities in the industry, the role of the artist as the tastemaker can easily be forgotten. Lu, however, is not one to forget.

On one song, “Guide Light,” for example, Lu addresses these transitions head-on. She meets herself on the verge of destroying all that she’s built because of a lack of confidence in her own mission. She opines about having no one to turn to, a UFO-like synth looming ominously over the hook, asking desperately who will guide her when she doesn’t think she’ll have the strength to go on. It’s an articulation of some of her worst fears. But these are also fears she’ll never let manifest on her watch.

“I’ve been doing this for two years now. It may seem like a short time, but even from the beginning, I’ve tried my best not to let all of the stress get to me. First of all, this is supposed to be fun. And I remind myself every day to be grateful and have gratitude that I’m able to do music full time,” Lu explains. “Being able to see the good makes me not really ever think about the stress and pressure that people put on me because I’m confident that I can perform well as long as I’m setting out to be a better artist and working towards my goals. That grounds me and gives me a good mindset.”

“My songs [on this record] are more vulnerable and more connected to myself and my life stories, whereas I feel like on a couple of my past singles, I did write from my heart, but I wasn’t as connected to the things I was writing about and a lot of the lyrics were solely for the purpose of being catchy or being relatable to other people, or just so that I could have a song out. All the tracks on this album actually mean something to me,” she continues.

If not winter started coming together around April of last year. She’d finally come down from the Pandora cycle and the run of heavy touring that accompanied it. She decided – alongside Epstein – that it was time to “lock in” and get to work on a debut. Heading to the studio almost every day for weeks, she tested out new material. As the early demos started taking shape, Greenland and aldn both came into the picture.

“I was going to Gabe’s childhood home – which is where his studio is located, in Brentwood – at around four times a week. It was a very long Uber, and expensive, because I’m terrified of driving,” Lu jokes. “His house is so elevated and there’s this really pretty landscape of the mountain, and the change of scenery helped me refresh my brain.”

Working with aldn and Greenland, Lu allowed herself to open up her sonic palette and try new things on for size. While she was, at first, nervous for the shift, she tells me that her stepping out of her comfort zone only made the record stronger.

“A big thing was that neither of us were stubborn going into these sessions, and we were willing to experiment and create and listen to each other and mesh our idea into one,” Lu says. “It worked almost magically. Our first studio session, I went in really nervous and then came out with one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written. Ever since that song, I knew it was going to be a really fun, really intuitive journey to be on.” Though that first track didn’t make the cut for the record, a song she describes as its more-mature offspring, “Sword,” did.

Known as an ingenious guitarist and an inventive rocker, as Lu lets me in on her thought process behind this record, it’s clear she’s releasing If not winter with the intention of presenting herself as a writer, too. The title of the record is a direct reference to a Sappho book of the same name, one her manager had sent her earlier on in the recording process and that she’s remained glued to since.

“I thought that poetry could really help me jog my brain into thinking of better metaphors or just better words to use when I’m writing lyrics,” Lu explains. She wanted to lean into the art of storytelling, not just music-making, and she knew she had to lean on the arc of great authors to do so. Constructing her own syllabus, she religiously bought texts by Sappho and other poets, flipping through them whenever she was in creative need. Reading through this recording process was almost like making a pilgrimage to the well of inspiration, helping her learn how to construct narratives that were textured and complex.

Most of these stories came from her move to L.A., the strangeness and sadness that came from watching family relationships, friends, and romances shift before her eyes as she navigated notoriety in a new city. At the outset of the Wisp project, Lu was inclined to lean into that sadness, falling into that old but troublesome adage that the best art comes from pain. As her recording process continued – and as she found her footing in her new surroundings – she pressed herself for more. She wanted to write great songs not just about anxiety or loneliness but about positivity and presence. Tapping into that positivity was a direct result, she says, of refining her artistic practice. “Some of these songs on the album have a more positive outlook on life not necessarily because I found love or something specific to look forward to. It was just being present,” she explains.

“I know that a lot of people expect me to stick to a certain sound,” Lu admits. “But I wanted this album to serve as a reminder to people and my first step on the ground that I am providing a palette that is bigger than what they think I’m capable of.”