Make it stand out

Wisp feels like a punch. Wisp is best listened to in a mermaid’s lagoon with bright blue water (more on that later). Wisp has three million listeners on Spotify and two hundred million streams on her first-ever song, *Your Face*.
Natalie Lu, also known as Wisp, is the soft-spoken shoegaze star who has graced the stages of Camp Flognaw, Lollapalooza, and has opened for nu metal legends System of a Down and *Deftones* just three years into making music. Her most recent pinch-me moment: sharing the stage with Beabadoobee at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, a show which she says sets the tone for her upcoming tour with the singer. Come October, you can expect the San Francisco native to be sharing a tour bus with Bea as her opener, performing hits and unreleased music across America and in London.

When the 22-year-old played at Red Rocks and the crowd held up their flashlights, she felt like she was in space. Her songs don’t feel far off. Through the headphones, Wisp’s voice is buried deep underwater, at one with heavy guitar distortion. Her sound has been described as nu-metal mixed with shoegaze, as emo or pop punk. Natalie and her Hello Kitty guitar would agree.

So far, Wisp’s music has been dark, sad, and written while Natalie was at college studying computer science - “One of the lowest points in my life,” she says.

If Not Winter, her debut album that released in August 2025, came to her during that time, blending synths and electronic sounds. It was an album that gave the people what they wanted, she notes, “riding the wave of [hit songs] Your Face, See you soon, and Once then we’ll be free,” amassing millions of streams.

Metal corset by Janice Huang | Skirt (top worn as skirt) by Amber Pickup | Knee high boots by Maison Margiela from SEE ARCHIVE

“I want my listeners to be caught off guard and to feel some sort of emotion from that.”

In the year since her debut’s release, Natalie has played major international festivals, toured Asia, connected with her fans in her mum’s native Thailand, while writing new music on the road. Most times, music comes to her as she’s lying in bed. “My eyes are closed, and the lights are dark. Then a melody will start in my head, or lyrics will start forming in my head.”

In almost every song on If Not Winter, Wisp breathes heavy questions down the microphone. When asked if she writes to find answers to these questions, she says she’s never even noticed them.

“I think that it shows a lot about how I convey my feelings. I want my songs to feel open-ended to my listeners.” She continues, “I want them to either feel like they're asking the same question themselves, or have an answer to the song. I love when I read a book or watch a movie, and you're not really sure what happens at the end, and I think there's something really beautiful about creating that story for yourself.”

Like her writing, Natalie says that her music is never composed with a set structure. It’s a rule or “anti-rule” that she tries to follow. “I want my listeners to be caught off guard and to feel some sort of emotion from that.” Growing up, it was either listening to rock radio stations or classical music, and she draws from both. “The way that classical pieces are composed, they don't really have a structure to them…It kind of takes you on this journey and tells a story in a way where you don't really know what's going to happen next.”

If her debut album was forest green, her upcoming release would be iridescent silver. Natalie reflects on how she couldn’t have written If Not Winter as the person she is now. There is a sense that her understanding of the world is being reimagined as we speak. She enthuses, “I have so much love that I want to express, and so naturally it flows out of me a lot easier than it did on the last album, where I think on If Not Winter I was finding it hard to write songs about love because I wasn't sure if I was receiving any of it in the way that I wanted.”

The world she’s re-building is fueled by gothic romance and fantasy films. Wisp pictures herself as Tim Burton’s Emily in The Corpse Bride. “I’ve just been feeling really sparkly recently,” she says with a bashful smile. “This next album is very dominated by love. I think done in a way that is a lot more tasteful than my last album.”

As her unreleased single, Butterflies, is ready to fly from her back pocket, Natalie describes this era as familiar yet new. “I'm kind of putting myself back in my tween years,” with the influences of Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Panic at the Disco, and the Gorillaz – music she’d listen to in the car with her parents. Her new music is brighter, more hopeful. “I would describe it as a mix of shoegaze tones, but the riffs are more emo-leaning, and some of the melodies are really poppy, even pop-punky. Just like a mix of everything I love.”

The perfect setting to listen to her upcoming album? It exists only within the movie H2O: Just Add Water, on the island where the three girls get stranded on, Natalie dreams. “They fall into this cave with this beautiful, bright blue pool of water. On top of the water is this opening where you can see the sky, and if the full moon goes over the hole, you turn into a mermaid. I feel like that cove is the perfect place that I would want someone to listen to the album.” You can almost hear her milky voice bouncing off the walls.

Thrust into the limelight with a guitar strapped around her, it took some time for Natalie to get used to it all. “I feel the same way as when I go on a family trip, and my mom takes a terrible picture of me. I'm like 13 years old, going through the most awkward phase ever, and then she puts it on her Facebook, and everyone sees it, whereas now it’s 100 times bigger than that.”

Every new version of Natalie and Wisp is loved as if it’s her own child, and she’s now learning to embrace the spotlight with open arms. “As a 22-year-old, I still feel like I'm going through puberty. Like I feel like I've had my awkward phase six months ago, and then like two months ago again. It's always going to be changing.”

Awkward or not, Wisp is ready for her next chapter, and she says it will be “opal” and “twinkly”, music that punches and sparkles at once. It’s already gleaming on the horizon. “If you’ve never heard of me before, I want you to expect something you’re going to love,” she says. “I’m certain people will.”

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