Tori Kelly announces her sixth album ‘God Must Really Love Me,’ out June 12 via Epic Records, inspired by faith, marriage, and new motherhood
Ten days after giving birth to her son Zayden in November 2025, Tori Kelly was already singing voice memo ideas into her phone. That urgency is the engine behind “God Must Really Love Me,” her sixth studio album, due June 12 via Epic Records, and the most unguarded thing she has ever made. Two lead singles, “Control” and “Dive,” arrive Friday, May 8. The album was announced exclusively through Variety.
The record is built on three pillars Kelly identified early: her faith, her marriage to husband André Murillo, and new motherhood. “I was pretty clear on what I wanted to say,” she tells Variety. “I was like, this is the album and where I’m at. From there, it just really started taking shape.” The three-time Grammy winner had initially worried that becoming a parent might slow her creative momentum. Touring Europe with Ed Sheeran last summer while pregnant, she booked studios along the way, anxious about the uncertainty ahead. “I was just staying really open-minded, but starting to feel uneasy about it a little bit,” she says.
What happened next surprised her. The ideas came fast and without friction. Within two months of Zayden’s birth, she was in the studio with her two main collaborators, producer-songwriter Tommy King (the 1975, Dijon) and Dan Farber (Lizzo, Alessia Cara), knocking out the bulk of the album in two weeks. Additional contributors include Dixson, Nija Charles, Emily Warren, and Ammo, a room of writers and producers whose credits stretch across Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, Noah Kahan, and Kehlani. On several tracks, Zayden can be heard cooing in the background, recorded while Kelly held him on her lap in the booth.
Restraint as a Radical Act
“God Must Really Love Me” marks a deliberate step away from the maximalism of 2024’s “Tori.,” which leaned hard into Y2K pop and R&B energy. This album returns to the warmer, acoustic-leaning R&B of her earlier catalog, and Kelly’s vocal approach shifts accordingly. Her signature runs are still present, but they are deployed with care rather than spectacle. “I wanted the storytelling and lyrics to shine through,” she says. “I was really careful not to let it get in the way of the lyrics.”
That restraint extended to the recording process itself. Most songs were captured in single takes, on the day they were written. “I wanted to capture the feeling in the moment. I didn’t really do multiple takes of these songs,” she explains. “It was pretty much like, day of, the way that we wrote it, let’s capture that feeling and then move on.” The result is an album that feels less like a produced pop record and more like an honest conversation.
The Summer Ahead
Kelly heads out on the road June 1 as part of Forrest Frank’s “The Jesus Generation” tour, a 29-date arena run across the U.S. that includes stops at Madison Square Garden, Intuit Dome in Los Angeles, and Moody Center in Austin. She will be traveling with Murillo and Zayden, a detail that feels entirely consistent with the ethos of the album itself.
I really challenged myself to peel back the layers and go much deeper with my lyrics,” she said in a statement. “In the past I’ve held back from getting too specific in my songs, but this time I just completely let go”
The album’s title is an expression of gratitude, but Kelly is clear that she wants the feeling to travel beyond her own story. “The title is ‘God Must Really Love Me,’ but at the end of the day, I would love it if people felt that for themselves too,” she says. “Feel how loved they are, how special they are. It’s definitely my slow-down type of album. Let’s take a deep breath. Let’s go outside, touch some grass and be grateful for what we have.”
