The latest album from three-time Grammy winner Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me captures her in a moment of near-magical harmony between inner life and artistic impulse. Within two months of giving birth to her first child, the Southern California-bred singer/songwriter found herself gripped by a rush of inspiration that reshaped her creative instincts in real time, stripping away any tendency to overthink. As a flood of new songs spilled out with an urgency she’d never experienced, Tori locked into the songwriting process with full-hearted conviction, frequently recording voice memos while nursing her son. The sixth studio LP from a generational vocal talent, God Must Really Love Me ultimately offers a wildly joyful and richly textured meditation on love, identity, and the quiet work of protecting your peace amid the constant noise of the outside world.
“Before the baby was born I’d tried to work on as many songs as possible, because I thought maybe I wouldn’t want to write once I was in mom mode,” reveals Tori, whose son, Zayden, arrived in November 2025. “But then everything just hit me at once, which I think had to do with feeling so overwhelmed with love in this new chapter of my life. Right away I knew what I needed to say and exactly how I wanted it to sound, and by January the whole record was done.”
The follow-up to 2024’s TORI. , God Must Really Love Me marks her most intimate work yet in a critically celebrated catalog that began with 2015’s Unbreakable Smile (a gold-certified effort that earned her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist) . In a meaningful departure from her previous work, Tori crafted most of the new LP’s songs in solitude before heading into the studio with in-demand producers/co-writers like DIXSON (Kehlani, Vic Mensa), Nija Charles (Summer Walker, Kiana Ledé), Emily Warren (Dua Lipa, Noah Kahan), and Ammo (Beyoncé, Teddy Swims). “From the beginning, I knew that this music had to start with me,” she says. “I wanted each song to feel like it could only come from my heart, so I challenged myself to peel back the layers and go much deeper with my lyrics. In the past I’ve held back from getting too specific in my songs, out of fear that people might not relate, but this time I just completely let go.”
Despite taking shape faster than anything she’s ever created, God Must Really Love Me moves with an unhurried ease that echoes the effortless confidence and clarity of vision that Tori brought to every step of the album’s creation. Although the LP mostly came to life in Los Angeles with her two main collaborators, Tommy King (HAIM, Donna Missal) and Dan Farber (Lizzo, Alessia Cara), a number of songs surfaced while touring Europe in summer 2025 with superstar Ed Sheeran. “I was pregnant during the tour and started feeling really inspired, so I ended up booking studio time almost everywhere we went,” explains Tori, who recorded parts of the album in Sweden, Switzerland, and England. With its radiant fusion of R&B, soul, acoustic pop, and gospel, the resulting body of work unveils a new dimension of her sophisticated musicality and singular voice—the outcome of a newfound willingness to let restraint carry as much impact as virtuosity. “There’s definitely times where I let loose and really sing, but for the most part I wanted to make sure that my vocals never got in the way of my lyrics and storytelling,” says Tori. “Usually I’m very meticulous about my vocal performance, but this time I intentionally kept in some of the imperfections to preserve the feeling of the songs from the moment they were written.”
Instantly setting the tone for its soulful effervescence, God Must Really Love Me opens on its sublimely tender title track: a minute-long outpouring of adoration for her son, adorned with a heart-melting recording of Zayden’s voice. “I was driving to the studio and felt so overcome with gratitude for my life with my son and my husband, and that phrase just came to me,” says Tori. “After a while I realized it’s the perfect title for the album—my faith has always grounded me, and I knew that I wanted to lean into that and write about it more directly on this record.”
With equal parts disarming candor and dazzling complexity, God Must Really Love Me illuminates the many ways in which faith shapes the contours of Tori’s internal world. On “Control,” for instance, she alchemizes a moment of everyday chaos into a hypnotic meditation on surrender, magnifying the track’s gentle intensity with hard-hitting beats, incandescent harmonies, and hip-hop-inspired vocal flow. “The day we came up with that song I’d lost the key to my house, and everything felt so scattered,” says Tori. “Instead of trying to ignore how stressed out I was, we decided to embrace it and write about how I cope when life feels crazy. It’s about how I always turn to God, and release those worries so they don’t end up weighing me down.”
In its captivating snapshot of a highly transformative era in Tori’s journey, God Must Really Love Me inhabits a euphoric energy on “Dive,” a windows-down anthem that channels the pure exhilaration of plunging into the unknown. “I wrote ‘Dive’ when I was seven months pregnant and feeling giddy and anxious about moving into the next phase of my life,” she says. “It’s about recognizing that we won’t get it right all the time, but we just have to dive in and do our best.” Penned just ten days after Zayden’s birth (and featuring audio of the very instant he arrived), the luminous and dreamlike “Too Much” speaks to the sweet disorientation of being consumed by love. “That song came from being amazed at how much love I feel for this little human, to the point where I wondered if I could almost be too obsessed,” says Tori. “It makes me emotional every time I play it back and hear the audio of his birth, because it’s such a special, personal moment to share with the world.”
On songs like “Bird”—the centerpiece and emotional core of God Must Really Love Me— Tori turns introspective and gives voice to her deepest fears and insecurities. Partly inspired by her recent discovery that her name means “bird” in Japanese, the stark and sprawling track unfolds in a breathless cascade of questions at the verses (e.g., “What if I’m past my prime? / And I wasted precious time?…What if you leave like my dad did? / What if all our best days are in past tense?” ), then morphs into soul-soothing reassurance at the chorus. “There’s a scripture that I’ve always gravitated toward, about how the birds are free from worry because they trust that God will take care of them,” says Tori, referring to Matthew 6:26. “I love how the verses to that song have some real grit and heaviness to them, but then when you get to the chorus there’s this incredible relief that comes from remembering that God’s got you and it’s okay to let go.”
Another piece of in-depth self-reflection, “Smooth Landing” takes the form of a piano-led stunner that interrogates the relationship between success and self-worth, drawing from Tori’s own experience in stepping into the national spotlight at just eleven years old. “That song tells the story of my career: starting out young, falling in love with music, and sometimes letting outside voices pull me off course,” she says. “It’s one thing to dream and strive, but you can’t let that replace your happiness. ‘Smooth Landing’ is close to my heart because it expresses what it feels like to have finally found a real sense of peace by building a life that I love.”
In a full-circle bookend to its title track, God Must Really Love Me closes out on “Bliss”—an acoustic-guitar-driven, harmony-laced reverie written as a lullaby while holding her son, again featuring Zayden’s voice. But for all its unguarded specificity—the voice memos recorded in private moments, the references to places and experiences that belong only to her—the album endlessly reaches outward in hopes of bringing solace and connection to her audience. “At the end of the day, I want people to feel loved when they hear this record,” says Tori.
